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Junius Edwards was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, He was educated at the University of Oslo in Norway The short story "Liars Don’t Qualify" has been anthologized in many books devoted to the writing of contemporary black authors. It won first prize in the Writer’s Digest Short Story Contest. In 1959 Edwards won a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship for Creative Writing. His short story "Mother Dear and Daddy," can be found in the anthology The Angry Black.

The son of a political activist, Martin Espada was born and reared in New York's impoverished East Side neighborhood. He grew up participating in demonstrations for social justice. After becoming a lawyer, he worked as a tenants’ rights advocate, but he also wrote and published poems in the tradition of Pablo Neruda and the poets of the Nuyorican scene. Espada’s work has won the Paterson Poetry Prize and the PEN/Revson Fellowship, the Gustavo Myers Outstanding Book Award, and the Independent Publisher Book Award, Currently, he teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he writes essays, edits anthologies, and continues to write poems.

James Farmer was a leader in the fight to desegregate public transportation in the I 960s, Born in Texas in 1920. Farmer was an outstanding student and received degrees from Wiley College and Howard University Along with several Christian pacifists, he founded the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942, with the purpose of directing challenges to American racism by using Gandhi’s tactics of nonviolence. In 1947 Farmer participated in CORE’s Chicago restaurant sit-ins, which helped end restaurant discrimination against blacks. An articulate and charismatic man, Farmer became the national director of CORE in 1961, organizing Freedom Rides in the Deep South, He was appointed Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare by President Nixon. After leaving that position in 1971, Farmer worked at the Council on Minority Planning and Strategy, an African American think-tank. Farmer was awarded the Congressional Medal for Freedom in 1998 and died of complications from severe diabetes in July of 1999.

As a child growing up in California, Paul Fleischman liked riding his bike and looking for found objects more than anything else in the world. When he grew up he worked as a carpenter, bagel baker, bookstore clerk, library aide, and proofreader before becoming a writer. His work, which spans many genres, has won Newbery awards, a Golden Kite award, and the Scott O’Dell award, Fleischman does not write for recognition but because he is, he says, "a maker at heart." He constructs his stories slowly and carefully, taking pleasure in every page. Recently Fleischman has begun writing for adults as well as children, but he has no intention of limiting his work to one group of readers.

Russel Freedman is a nonfiction writer who prefers to call himself a "factual writer," because writing about factual topics sounds more interesting than not writing about fiction, Freedman has written close to forty books on various topics, including animal behavior and the behavior of admirable human beings, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Crazy Horse, and Abraham Lincoln. He has won dozens of awards for making science and history come alive. His books often include his carefully chosen photographs about his topics.

Civil war broke out in his native Greece in 1948 when Nicholas Gage was a child. Communist insurgents were kidnapping children and sending them to re-education camps inside Communist territory. Nicholas and his three sisters eluded them when their mother arranged for them to escape to the United States. At age nine, Nicholas went to live with his father in Massachusetts. His mother, who remained in Greece, was imprisoned, tortured, and executed. When Gage grew up, he became an investigative reporter for the New York Times. He returned to Greece and learned about his mother’s fate, which led to the writing of his bestselling book, Eleni. Currently, Gage works full-time as a biographical and historical writer

Born in 1945 in Champaign, Illinois, Bill Geist attended the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana. There he met his wife, Jody. They were married in 1970. In 1971, he graduated from the University of Missouri with a masters degree in communications. From 1972 to 1980 Geist was a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune. In 1980 Geist joined the New York Times, where his “About New York” column appeared twice a week. Geist has been a correspondent for the CBS news program Sunday Morning since 1987, where his work was honored with an Emmy Award in 1992 for his report on the sixty-sixth anniversary of America’s famed Route 66. Geist also contributes to 60 Minutes II and is the bestselling author of six books, including The Big Five-Oh: Facing, Fearing and Fighting 50 and the New York Times bestseller Little League Confidential, an account of his experience as a coach of his son and daughter’s Little League teams. His biggest accomplishment, he says, comes from taking third in the Illinois State Fair Bake-Off.

Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr.. was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Called Nikki from an early age, she is considered a leader in the black poetry movement. After graduating from Fisk University with a history degree, Giovanni went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work and the Columbia University School of Fine Arts. Believing that change is necessary for growth, Nikki’s poetry is renowned for its urgent call for black people to embrace their own identity and to fully understand white-controlled culture. Her poetry collection, Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black ]udgment, captures the militant attitude of the civil rights and black arts movements of that time. Her work has been honored with an NAACP Image Award as well as the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry Giovanni prides herself on being "a Black American, a daughter, a mother, and a professor of English."

Named ltzok Isaac Granich at birth, Michael Gold was born in 1894 in New York of Jewish immigrant parents. Deeply opposed to US involvement in World War I, Gold moved to Mexico in 1917 to avoid the draft. Gold returned to New York in 1920 and pursued a life in publishing, writing, and editing numerous books about social issues before his death in 1967.

Paul Greenberg is a nationally syndicated conservative columnist for the Arkansas Democratic Gazette in Little Rock, Arkansas. His editorials have won the Pulitzer Prize, the Walker Stone Award, and the H, L. Mencken Award.