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.
