Duncan Tonatiuh

Duncan Tonatiuh (toh-nah-tee-YOU) is an award-winning author-illustrator. He is both Mexican and American. He grew up in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and graduated from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College in New York City. His artwork is inspired by Pre-Columbian art, particularly that of the Mixtec codices. His aim is to create images and stories that honor the past, but that are relevant to people, especially children, nowadays.

Tonatiuh’s most recent books, published through Abrams Press, include Día de Muertos: Números (2023), A Land of Books (2022), Feathered Serpent and the Five Suns (2020), and Soldier For Equality (2019) for which he received a Pura Belpré Author Honor. Tonatiuh has received Américas Awards for Child of the Flower-Song People (illustrator), Undocumented, and Danza! His 2016 picture book, The Princess and the Warrior, and his 2015 Funny Bones each received a Pura Belpré Illustration Honor and the New York Times Best Illustrated Books Award. Children’s Choice finalist Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote earned Tonatiuh a Tomás Rivera Award and both a Pura Belpré Illustration Honor and a Pura Belpré Writing Honor. He also received the Pura Belpré Illustration Award and Tomás Rivera Award for Diego Rivera (2012).

Ibi Zoboi

New York Times Bestselling author Ibi Zoboi was born in Haiti. When she was four, she immigrated to New York with her mother. Zoboi is the author of numerous titles including: S(k)in (2025); American Street, which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Young Adult’s Literature, a Time Magazine Best YA Book Of All Time, and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year; and Pride (2018), a contemporary remix of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Zoboi is also the co-author of the Walter Award and L.A. Times Book Prize-winning Punching the Air (2021) with prison reform activist Dr. Yusef Salaam, an Exonerated Five member, which was also shortlisted for the U.K.’s Yoto Carnegie Medal. She is the editor of Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America (2020), an essential collection of captivating stories about what it’s like to be young and Black in America. Her debut picture book, The People Remember (2021), received a Coretta Scott King Book Honor Award. Her other recent titles include Okoye to the People: A Black Panther Novel (2022) for Marvel; Star Child (2023), an illumination of the young life of the visionary storyteller Octavia E. Butler in poems and prose; and the novel Nigeria Jones (2023), which won the 2024 Coretta Scott King Book Award.