Maya Soetoro-Ng was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, and is a writer and educator with a PhD in international comparative education. She says Ladder to the Moon, her first picture book, was inspired by her young daughter Suhaila’s questions about her grandmother Ann Dunham, the mother of Maya and of our forty-fourth president, Barack Obama.
Yuyi Morales is the illustrator of Kathleen Krull’s Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez, whose accolades include a Pura Belpré Award and a Christopher Medal, as well as the Pura Belpré Award-winning Los Gatos Black on Halloween by Marisa Montes. Born and raised in Mexico, she now lives in northern California.
Born in Mexico and raised among giant grandmothers, mossy house walls, and rampaging feral gardens, Yuyi Morales fostered a strong bond with the magical stories that ran in her family. Sinceimmigrating to the USA in 1994, she has drawn from her family’s legacy and her heritage to create some of the most celebrated Latino works for children’s books.
Yuyi is the multiple winner of Pura Belpré Medal for Illustration, given to a Latino illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.
Some of other recognitions to her work include the Américas Award, the Golden Kite Award, the Christopher Award, the Jane Adams Children’s Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award won in 2004 and 2008.
Asked about her work, Yuyi says, “I strive to capture the incredible beauty of the everyday forms and to use textures and colors as another way to reveal the heart of the story. I also pursue glow and luminosity with resolve. If I could ask for a talent, it would be to become a color genius.”
