A. Ross Johnson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an adviser to the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Project at the Hoover Archives. He has served as director of Radio Free Europe, director of the RFE/RL Research Institute, and acting president and counselor of RFE/RL. He is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
David Soman was born in New York and graduated from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. He is an illustrator and also teaches courses at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Some of his published credits include Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy, Splash! and Poems of Our Watery World. His awards include: Ezra Jack Keats/Unicef Award, Coretta Scott King Award, Aileen & Manuel Torres Graphics Award, Catherine Lolliard Wolfe Award, William Allan White Children's Book Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.