Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D. is a Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the 2024 New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development’s Dorothy Height Distinguished Alumni Award winner. Her research has appeared in several top-tier academic journals. She is co-editor of five books and is co-author of the multiple award-winning book Advancing Racial Literacies in Teacher Education: Activism for Equity in Digital Spaces (2021) where she examines her concept of Archeology of Self ™ in education. For three years in a row, she was named one of EdWeek’s EduScholar Influencers — a list of the Top 1% of educational scholars in the United States — a highly selective group of 200 scholars (chosen from a pool of 20,000).

At Teachers College, she is the founder of the Racial Literacy Project @TC, and the Racial Literacy Roundtables Series, where for 15 years, national scholars, teachers, and students facilitate conversations around race and other issues involving diversity. Yolanda appeared in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright” (2016), a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou, and “Defining Us, Children at the Crossroads of Change, a documentary about supporting and educating the nation’s Black and Latinae male youth. Yolanda’s first full-length collection of poetry, Love from the Vortex & Other Poems, was published in March 2020. Her sophomore book of poetry, The Peace Chronicles, was published in July, 2021. Yolanda opened the 2022 TEDx UPENN conference at the University of Pennsylvania with her TEDx Talk: Truth, Love & Racial Literacy. Connect with Yolanda on Twitter at @RuizSealey and on Instagram at @yolie_sealeyruiz

Jasmine Warga is the New York Times-bestselling author of middle grade novels Other Words For Home, The Shape of Thunder, and A Rover’s Story. Other Words For Home earned multiple awards, including a John Newbery Honor, a Walter Honor for Young Readers, and a Charlotte Huck Honor. The Shape of Thunder was a School Library Journal and Bank Street best book of the year, a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Children’s and YA Book Award, and has been named to several state award reading lists. Her latest novel, A Rover’s Story, was an instant New York Times bestseller, an Indie Next List, a Junior Library Guild selection, and was named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post. Jasmine is also the author of young adult novel, My Heart and Other Black Holes, which has been translated into over twenty different languages.

Jasmine grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. She studied art history and history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She briefly taught 6th grade science in Texas before going on to get her MFA in creative writing from Lesley University in Boston. She quickly discovered that writing for kids and teens was the perfect combination of her dual interests in storytelling and working with kids.

Growing up, Jasmine felt a lot of pressure to become a doctor to please her immigrant father. She also didn’t quite believe she could really be an author because she never read stories about girls like her. She now feels extra inspired to write books that will help other young people feel empowered to tell their own stories. She also strongly believes that all kids should have the opportunity to see diversity in their literary protagonists and heroes, and that we all gain empathy and insight from reading outside of our own experience.

These days, Jasmine lives with her husband, two young daughters, grumpy cat, and a very energetic dog in a book-filled house in the Chicago-area.