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.
Carole Boston Weatherford is an African-American author and critic, now living in North Carolina, United States. She is the winner of the 2022 Coretta Scott King Award for Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre. She writes children's literature and some historical books, as well as poetry and commentaries. Weatherford is best known for her controversial criticism of Pokémon character Jynx and Dragon Ball character Mr. Popo. Today, she often writes with her son, Jeffery Boston Weatherford, who is an illustrator and poet.
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.
Sharon Mills Draper is an American children's writer, professional educator, and the 1997 National Teacher of the Year. She is a five-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 illustrator, and the Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Award for Uptown, the first book he both wrote and illustrated. He has won six King Awards as illustrator and he is a four-time Caldecott honor recipient.
Andrea Davis Pinkney is the author of numerous books for children and young adults, including picture books, novels, works of historical fiction and nonfiction who 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 U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2006 and he won the Laura Ingalls Wilder 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.
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 Lewis' #1 New York Times bestselling autobiographical graphic novel trilogy March—with Representative John Lewis, which debuted in 2013 by Top Shelf Productions.
Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane is a children’s picture book by American author and critic Carole Boston Weatherford. It tells the story of a young John Coltrane growing up in the South in the 1930s. The book, published by Henry Holt in 2008, was illustrated by Sean Qualls.
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.
The 2019 Youth Media Awards were held by the American Library Association on January 28, 2019. The awards recognize books written for children and young adults and the authors and illustrators who create them.
Let the Children March is a 2018 children's picture book written by Monica Clark-Robinson and illustrated by Frank Morrison, originally published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The historical fiction work is set during the Birmingham Children's Crusade in 1963. The book was named a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book in 2019.
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 her Coretta Scott King Award-winning middle grade novel Keeping the Night Watch.
