Ibi Zoboi was born in Haiti, and holds an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Book Review, and The Rumpus, among others. She is the author of American Street, a US National Book Award finalist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and three children.

Leah Henderson writes for young readers of all ages, and her books have been named a Children's Africana Book Awards Notable and a Bank Street Best Book.

Leah holds an MFA in writing and is on the faculty of Spalding University's graduate writing program. She resides in Washington, D.C.

Nic Stone is a native of Atlanta and a Spelman College graduate. After working extensively in teen mentoring and living in Israel for a few years, she returned to the United States to write full-time.

Dear Martin, her first novel, is loosely based on a series of true events involving the shooting deaths of unarmed African American teenagers.

Shaken by the various responses to these incidents--and to the pro-justice movement that sprang up as a result--Stone began the project in an attempt to examine current affairs through the lens of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s teachings.

Justina Ireland is the New York Times bestselling author of Promise of Shadows, Vengeance Bound and the Devil's Pass series. An active figure in the YA community, she has an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University and started a database for sensitivity readers at Writing in the Margins.

Renée Watson is the New York Times bestselling, Newbery Honor, and Coretta Scott King Award-winning author of Piecing Me Together, This Side of Home, What Momma Left Me, and Betty Before X, co-written with Ilyasah Shabazz, as well as two acclaimed picture books: A Place Where Hurricanes Happen and Harlem's Little Blackbird, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

She is the founder of I, Too, Arts Collective, a nonprofit committed to nurturing underrepresented voices in the creative arts, and currently lives in New York City.

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. He holds a B.A. from Yale, a M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School fo the Arts, a Master's degree in droit economique from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.

His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana Magazine, Uncanny, and Lightspeed. His non-fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. Riot Baby is his adult fiction debut.