Karuna Riazi drinks a lot of tea and wears a lot of hats, including student in the Hamline University MFAC program, educator and diversity advocate. She is the author of The Gauntlet (Salaam Reads, 2017), its companion The Battle (2019) and Ghostwriter: The Jungle Book (Sesame Workshop/Sourcebooks Wonderland, 2019).

Gail D. Villanueva is a Filipino web designer/developer and author of A POTFUL OF MAGIC (2021) and MY FATE ACCORDING TO THE BUTTERFLY (2019), a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People. She lives in the Philippines with her husband and their spoiled pets.

Best known for her world maps in the Brooklyn Brujas trilogy by Zoraida Cordova, Cat Scully is the writer and illustrator of YA horror comic-novel JENNIFER STRANGE, releasing July 21, 2020 from Haverhill House Publishing. When she’s not writing or drawing, she works in video game development for the Deep End Games on their next […]

Best known for earning accolades for her humorous social media presence for over a decade, Kim is an author and freelance writer whose longer work has been published in a dozen books and thousands of articles both online and in print. She’s currently working on her first middle grade novel.

Alaina Lavoie is the communications manager at We Need Diverse Books and teaches in the MFA and MA programs at Emerson College. She lives in Boston with her wife and two literary cats.

Susan Muaddi Darraj won an American Book Award for her short story collection, A Curious Land; the book also won an Arab American Book Award and the AWP Grace Paley Prize. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including a USA Ford Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, a Maryland Individual Artists Award, and […]

Kat Cho used to hide books under the bathroom sink and then sneak in there to read after bedtime. Her parents pretended not to know. This helped when she decided to write a dinosaur time-travel novel at the tender age of nine. Sadly, that book was not published. She currently lives and works in NYC […]

I.W. Gregorio is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. Her novels include Lambda Literary Award finalist None of the Above, and This Is My Brain in Love, which has received three starred reviews so far. She is proud to be a board member of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, and […]