Joyce Carol Thomas is an internationally renowned author who received the National Book Award for her first novel, Marked By Fire, and a Coretta Scott King Honor for The Blacker the Berry and for her first picture book, Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea. Her picture book I Have Heard of a Land received a Coretta Scott King Honor and an IRA/CBC Teachers' Choice Award and was an ALA Notable Book. Her other titles include The Gospel Cinderella, Crowning Glory, Gingerbread Days, and A Gathering of Flowers. Ms. Thomas lives in Berkeley, California. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include Dust Tracks on a Road; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Jonah's Gourd Vine; Moses, Man of the Mountain; Mules and Men; and Every Tongue Got to Confess. Bryan Collier is the illustrator of rosa by Nikki Giovanni and Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by Doreen Rappaport, both Caldecott Honor Books, and the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Visiting Langston by Willie Perdomo. He also wrote and illustrated the Coretta Scott King Award-winning Uptown. Besides illustrating children's books, Bryan donates his time to painting murals in his Harlem, New York, neighborhood.