Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a historian and professor of African American studies at Emory University. Her first book was A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City. Her second book, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and a winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Award. She is also the author of She Came to Slay, an illustrated tribute to Harriet Tubman, and Susie King Taylor and is the coexecutive producer of the HBO series The Gilded Age.

Kathleen Van Cleve teaches creative writing and film at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written three books, including the award-winning middle grade novel Drizzle and lives in Philadelphia with her husband and sons.