Marilyn Nelson is the author of many award-winning books, including Carver: A Life in Poems, which was a National Book Award finalist, a Newbery Honor Book, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and received the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. She is also the author of A Wreath for Emmett Till, which garnered the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, a Coretta Scott King Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor. She lives in Connecticut.

Tammi Lawson is the curator of the Art and Artifacts Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the steward of a collection of over fifteen thousand items that visually document the Black Diaspora. The Schomburg also houses the largest collection of art by Augusta Savage in a public institution. The New York Public Library recently awarded Lawson the 2020 Bertha Franklin Feder Award for Excellence in Librarianship.