Author and educator Corey Ann Haydu has been publishing critically acclaimed books in the young adult and children’s space since 2013. Since 2019, she has been on faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts in their Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA program. 

Corey grew up outside Boston, Massachusetts, and has been living in New York City since 2001, when she came to the city to earn her BFA in Theatre from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Following a few years of acting and cocktail waitressing (and nannying, real estate agent-ing, pilates instructing and telemarketing), Corey earned her MFA in Writing for Children from The New School. 

Corey’s books have been Edgar Award nominees, Amazon Books of the Month, RISE Honorees, Junior Library Guild Selections, Kirkus, PW, and SLJ Best Books of the Year, BCCB Blue Ribbon Honorees, and more. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her family. 

Sara Zarr is the acclaimed author of ten novels and two works of nonfiction. She’s a National Book Award finalist and two-time Utah Book Award winner. Her books have been variously named to annual best books lists of the American Library Association, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, School Library Journal, the Guardian, the International Reading Association, the New York Public Library and Los Angeles Public Library, and have been translated into many languages. She has served as a judge for the National Book Award.

Sara has written essays, creative nonfiction, and short fiction for Image, Hunger Mountain online, Response, Gather, and Relief Journal as well as for several anthologies, and is a MacDowell Fellow (2014). Her first book, Story of a Girl, was made into a 2017 television movie directed by Kyra Sedgwick. Story of a Girl was recently named one of the Best Books of the 21st Century by Kirkus.