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An author and poet of Mexican-American descent, Pat Mora has written more than 25 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for children and adults. Her grandparents immigrated to the United States during the Mexican Revolution. They spoke only Spanish. Their daughter Estela, who was Pat's mother, grew up translating English into Spanish for her parents. Estela raised her daughter to be bilingual. Thus, many of Mora's books contain both English and Spanish text.

Born in Massachusetts in 1915 to the children of Jewish immigrants, Milton Meltzer learned to read early in life. He does not recall how he learned to read, but does remember days spent at the library reading such stories as The Arabian Nights and Gulliver’s Travels. A full scholarship paid Meltzer's way through Columbia University. After serving in the Army Air Force during World War II, Meltzer returned to the United States to work as a publicist and then a freelance writer and editor In 1946, he published his first book, a pictorial history of Black Americans. Today, he has written more than seventy books, mostly nonfiction books for young adults. Many of his books have either won awards or been nominated for them, and several have been named Best Children’s Book of the Year.

Born in 1849 to a prosperous Jewish-Portuguese family in New York City, Emma Lazarus began writing as a teenager. In 1886, her father published her first book of poems, entitled Poems and Translations. Lazarus was a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who admired her writing and helped make Lazarus part of an elite circle of American writers. Lazarus was an advocate for Jewish immigrants escaping persecution in Europe and Russia, and many of her poems reflect that concern. Lazarus died of Hodgkin’s disease at age 38. Her poem "The New Colossus," which in 1904 was etched on the base of the Statue of Liberty, became one of the most often quoted poems in the English Language.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.