Wendelin Van Draanen was born on January 6, 1965 in Chicago, Illinois. She is the daughter of chemists who emigrated from Holland. She worked as a math teacher and then as a computer science teacher before becoming an author. Wendelin Van Draanen began her writing career with a screenplay and soon switched to adult novels and then children's books. She is best known for her Sammy Keyes series of novels, which she started writing in 1997, featuring a teenage detective named Samantha Keyes. Her popular Sammy Keyes series had been nominated four times for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Children's Mystery and won with "Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief". Her Shredderman series also yielded a… Christopher Medal for Secret Identity. She has also written several novels such as: How I Survived Being a Girl and Flipped.
Brian Biggs was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on March 9, 1968. He attended Parsons School of Design in New York City. He has worked as an art director and graphic designer, animator for interactivity and multimedia projects, teacher, writer, and illustrator. He illustrated the Shredderman series written by Wendelin Van Draanen, the Roscoe Riley Rules series written by Katherine Applegate, and the Brownie and Pearl series written by Cynthia Rylant. He writes and illustrates the Everything Goes series.