Karen Deans has worked as a journalist and is also a muralist, illustrator, writer, and entrepreneur. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area with her husband and three children. Surprised when she was unable to find biographies of many of the women she admired to share with her daughter, she decided to write her own. Her other books include Swing Sisters: The Story of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
Elbrite Brown is an illustrator, artist, and high school art teacher. His illustrations for My Family Plays Music by Judy Cox won him a Coretta Scott King / John Septoe Award for New Talent. More than anything else, Elbrite looks at art as a way for him to inspire others. While doing research on Althea Gibson, he went to tennis matches and studied photographs and videos of the great star in action. He came to feel that Althea Gibson was as graceful as a ballerina and tried to capture just the right sense of movement in this book.
