About the Authors
Jon Scieszka is best known for his bestselling picture books, including The True Story of the Three Little Pigs! and The Stinky Cheese Man. He is also the founder of guysread.com and a champion force behind guyslisten.com, and was the first National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature.
Steve Sheinkin is the award-winning author of fast-paced, cinematic histories for young readers. His The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights was longlisted for the National Book Award. Bomb: The Race to Build-and Steal-the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon was a Newbery Honor Book, a National Book Award finalist, and winner of the Sibert Award and YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults.
Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) was born in Odense, Denmark, the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman. As a young teenager, he became quite well known in Odense as a reciter of drama and as a singer. When he was fourteen, he set off for the capital, Copenhagen, determined to become a national success on the stage. He failed miserably, but made some influential friends in the capital who got him into school to remedy his lack of proper education. In 1829 his first book was published. After that, books came out at regular intervals. His stories began to be translated into English as early as 1846. Since then, numerous editions, and more recently Hollywood songs and Disney cartoons, have helped to ensure the continuing popularity of the stories in the English-speaking world.
Jim Murphy is an editor and writer with more than a dozen books for young readers to his credit. Research Mr. Murphy was doing on the Civil War inspired his book The Boys’ War, as well as The Long Road to Gettysburg.
Elizabeth Partridge grew up in a large, eccentric family in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated with a degree in women’s studies from UC Berkeley, and later studied traditional Chinese medicine in Oxford, England. She was an acupuncturist for more than twenty years before closing her medical practice to write full-time. She has since published more than a dozen books, including Marching to Freedom: Walk Together, Children, and Don’t You Grow Weary, and biographies of Dorothea Lange, Woody Guthrie, and John Lennon. Elizabeth is on the core faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults.
Candace Fleming is the prolific author of The Great and
Only Barnum, a YALSA Award
for Excellence in Nonfiction nominee and a Publishers Weekly and Booklist
Best Book; The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award recipient; Our Eleanor, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults;
and Ben Franklin’s Almanac, a James
Madison Honor Book. She is also the author of many highly acclaimed picture
books.
Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, documentary scriptwriter, and author of twenty acclaimed books of nonfiction for adults and children, including the National Book Award finalist The Soul of an Octopus and two New York Times bestsellers, How to Be a Good Creature and Of Time and Turtles. She has received numerous honors, including lifetime achievement awards from the Humane Society and the New England Booksellers Association.
Thanhhà L?i was born in Vietnam and moved to Alabama in 1975. She received a degree in journalism from the University of Texas and worked as a journalist at the Orange County Register for two years before deciding to switch to fiction writing. She lives in New York City with her family and teaches writing at Parsons The New School of Design.
About the Narrators
MacLeod Andrews is an actor, voice actor, and Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator who earned the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2018. He has starred in a number of independent short and feature films and is a member of the Rising Phoenix Repertory Company in New York City.
James Langton, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and later as a musician at the Guildhall School in London. He has worked in radio, film, and television, also appearing in theater in England and on Broadway. He is also a professional musician who led the internationally renowned Pasadena Roof Orchestra from 1996 to 2002.
Bruce Thomas is
an American actor who played Batman in a series of commercials for General Motors’
OnStar service. He also played Batman for the pilot and premiere of the WB’s Birds of Prey television series and has
guest-starred on various other television series, including Bones, Weeds, and Kyle XY.
Hillary Huber, a Los Angeles–based voice talent with hundreds of commercials and promos under her belt, was bitten by the audiobook bug in 2005. She now records books on a regular basis and has been nominated for several Audie Awards and won numerous Earphones Awards.
Gregory
Itzin is an American film and television actor. He is best known for his role
as President Charles Logan in the series 24, a role for which he was twice
nominated for a Primetime Emmy. He has had appearances in a number of
television’s most popular shows during the span of his career, including, Matlock,
ER, CSI, Friends, The West Wing, and three different Star Trek series. He’s
also had roles in numerous films including, Adaptation, The Ides of March, and Lincoln.
Most recently he’s had recurring roles in The Mentalist and Covert Affairs.
George Newbern is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and a television and film actor best known for his roles as Brian MacKenzie in Father of the Bride and Father of the Bride Part II, as well as Danny in Friends. As a voice actor, he is notable for his role as Superman on the Cartoon Newtork series Static Shock, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited. He has guest starred on many television series, including Scandal, The Mentalist, Private Practice, CSI: Miami, and Numb3rs. He holds a BA in theater arts from Northwestern University.
MacLeod Andrews is an actor, voice actor, and Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator who earned the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2018. He has starred in a number of independent short and feature films and is a member of the Rising Phoenix Repertory Company in New York City.
Jack Garrett’s voice is immediately recognizable from his work in commercials and as a personality on radio stations in the West and Southwest. In addition to guest appearances on television, he has performed in dozens of theater productions on regional and New York stages, including Guys and Dolls, Hallelujah Breakdown, Prelude to a Kiss, Cast a Spell, and Bongo Fever.
Michael Crouch is an actor based in New York City. His audiobook narration has won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine, and Best of the Year accolades from Booklist, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. He can also be heard on national commercials, cartoons, video games, and the animé series Pokémon XY and Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V.
P. J. Ochlan is an Audie Award–winning, multiple Earphones Award–winning, and Voice Arts Award–nominated narrator of hundreds of audiobooks. His acting career spans more than thirty years and has also included Broadway, the NY Shakespeare Festival under Joseph Papp, critically acclaimed feature films, and television series regular roles.