President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He graduated with a degree in political science from Columbia University in 1983. Before moving to Chicago in 1985, he worked at Business International Corporation and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group. In Chicago, he worked as a community organizer with low-income residents. He entered Harvard Law School in 1988, was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, and graduated in 1991. After graduating law school, he returned to Chicago and became a civil rights lawyer. He also taught at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. In 1997, he was elected to the Illinois State Senate and… served until 2004. In 2000, he made an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2005, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. In 2007, he announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. On November 4, 2008, Obama defeated John McCain in the general election and became the first African-American to be elected President of the United States. He wrote Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance in 1995 and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream in 2006. He won Best Spoken Word Album Grammy Awards in 2006 and 2008 for abridged audiobook versions of both books.
Loren Long is a New York Times best-selling illustrator. Loren has illustrated Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could and Madonna's Mr. Peabody's Apples. His other New York Times best-selling books include: Toy Boat by Randall DeSeve which won the 2008 Great Lakes Book Award for Children's Picture Book, Angela and the Baby Jesus by the Pulitzer Prize winning author Frank McCourt, and the chapter book series Sluggers that he created with Phil Bildner. Loren's first picture book, Angela Johnson's I Dream of Trains, won the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Golden Kite Award for picture book illustration. His version of Walt Whitman's When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer… was a Golden Kite Honor Book. Recently, Loren has written and illustrated two picture books, Drummer Boy and Otis. Loren lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife and children.