Leo Dillon and Diane Dillon were American illustrators of children's books and adult paperback book and magazine covers. One obituary of Leo called the work of the husband-and-wife team "a seamless amalgam of both their hands". In more than 50 years, they created more than 100 speculative fiction book and magazine covers together as well as much interior artwork. Essentially all of their work in that field was joint.
Tom Feelings was an artist, cartoonist, children's book illustrator, author, teacher, and activist. He focused on the African-American experience in his work. His most famous book is The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo (1995).
Christopher Paul Curtis is an American children's book author. His first novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963, was published in 1995 and brought him immediate national recognition, receiving the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and the Newbery Honor Book Award in addition to numerous other awards. In 2000, he became the first person to win both the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award—prizes received for his second novel Bud, Not Buddy—and the first African-American man to win the Newbery Medal. His novel The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 was made into a television film in 2013.
The Coretta Scott King Award is an annual award presented by the Coretta Scott King Book Award Round Table, part of the American Library Association (ALA). Named for Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King Jr., this award recognizes outstanding books for young adults and children by African Americans that reflect the African American experience. Awards are given both to authors and to illustrators for universal human values.
Sharon Mills Draper is an American children's writer, professional educator, and the 1997 National Teacher of the Year. She is a two-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for books about the young and adolescent African-American experience. She is known for her Hazelwood and Jericho series, Copper Sun,Double Dutch, Out of My Mind and Romiette and Julio.
Nikki Grimes is an American author of books written for children and young adults, as well as a poet and journalist.
Earl Bradley Lewis is an American artist and illustrator. He is best known for his watercolor illustrations for children's books such as Jacqueline Woodson’s The Other Side and Jabari Asim’s Preaching to the Chickens: The Story of Young John Lewis.
Bryan Collier is an American writer and illustrator known best for illustrating children's books. He won both the Coretta Scott King Award as an illustrator and the Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Award for Uptown, the first book he both wrote and illustrated. He has won six Coretta Scott King Awards as illustrator and he is a four-time Caldecott Honor recipient.
Andrea Davis Pinkney is an author of numerous books for children and young adults, including picture books, novels, works of historical fiction and nonfiction; she writes about African-American culture. In addition to her work as an author, Pinkney has had a career as a children's book publisher and editor, including as founder of the Jump at the Sun imprint at Hyperion Books for Children, the Disney Book Group. She is vice president and editor-at-large for Scholastic Trade Books.
Ashley Frederick Bryan was an American writer and illustrator of children's books. Most of his subjects are from the African-American experience. He was a U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2006 and he won the Children's Literature Legacy Award for his contribution to American children's literature in 2009. His picture book Freedom Over Me was short-listed for the 2016 Kirkus Prize and received a Newbery Honor.
Elijah of Buxton is a 2007 children's novel by Christopher Paul Curtis. The book won critical praise and was a Newbery Honor book and the winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. It also was a children's book bestseller.
Mildred DeLois Taylor is a Newbery Award-winning American young adult novelist. She is best known for her novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, part of her Logan family series.
Andrew Aydin is an American comics writer, known as the Digital Director & Policy Advisor to Georgia congressman John Lewis, and co-author, with Lewis, of March, Lewis' #1 New York Times bestselling autobiographical graphic novel trilogy.
Patricia Marie Cummings is an American writer and illustrator of children's books.
Christian Robinson is an American illustrator of children's books and an animator. He is based in Sacramento, California and has worked with The Sesame Street Workshop and Pixar Animation Studios. He graduated from the California Institute of the Arts.
Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is a 2016 picture book biography by Javaka Steptoe about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Using a style similar to Basquiat's, the book tells the story of his childhood and early career. It won the 2017 Caldecott Medal and Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for its illustrations.
Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets is a 2017 collection of poems for children's by Kwame Alexander with co-authors Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth and illustrated by Ekua Holmes. The book won the 2018 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award. Each of the 20 poems is written in tribute to and in the style of a well known poet.
Freedom in Congo Square is a 2016 poetic nonfiction picture book by Carole Boston Weatherford, and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie. It was published in hardcover by Little Bee Books. The book provides an account of 19th-century slaves in New Orleans who were able to gather in one place on Sundays: Congo Square. In addition to the book's main text, "an introduction and afterword provide further historic detail."
Richard Gregory Christie is an American author and illustrator of picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, and album covers best known for his Coretta Scott King Award-winning books No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller, Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U. S. Marshal, and Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Only Passing Through, and the NAACP Image Award-winning Our Children Can Soar: A Celebration of Rosa, Barack, and the Pioneers of Change.
Hope Anita Smith is an American poet and author of children's books, best known for winning the Coretta Scott King Honor for her middle grade novel Keeping the Night Watch.
