J. Patrick Lewis was born on May 5, 1942. He is a poet and prose writer who is known for his children's poems. He worked as a professor of economics before devoting himself full-time to writing in 1998. He is the author of 90 children's books including: BoshBlobberBosh, Please Bury Me in the Library, A Hippopotamusn't, First Dog, Spot the Plot, The House, and The National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry. In 2014, his title Voices from the March on Washington, made the Hot Civil Rights Titles List. He has received many awards from the American Library Association, The Golden Kite Award from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, the Claudia Lewis Award from The Bank Street… School and others. He also received the 2010-11 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Excellence in Children's Poetry Award. He was also named the third, U.S. Children's Poet Laureate for 2011-2013 by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago.
Douglas Florian, writer and illustrator of children's books, was born March 18, 1950 in New York City. He was educated at Queens College of the City University of New York, receiving a B.A. in 1973. He also attended the School of Visual Arts in 1976. His early work was as a political illustrator and cartoonist; he did many drawings for The New York Times and for the New Yorker magazine. More recently, his self-illustrated books include A Fisher, Beast Feast, and Bing Bang Boing. His illustrations have appeared in Freeing the Natural Voice (with Kristin Linklater), Dorothy O. Van Woerkom's Tit for Tat, and Thomas M. Cook and Robert A. Russell's Introduction to Management Science.… Additionally, he has contributed more than 300 drawings to magazines and newspapers, including Travel and Leisure, Across the Board, and The Nation. Florian has received numerous awards including the Reading Magic Award from Parenting magazine in 1994 for Bing, Bang, Boing. He was the Books of Distinction finalist in the Hungry Mind Review for Bing Bang Boing. Beast Feast received the Gold Medal from the National Parenting Publications awards in 1994, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Award for Poetry in 1995, and Dinothesaurus was a Junior Library Guild Selection in 2010.