Deborah Wiles was born in Alabama and grew up in an Air Force family, moving many times but digging deep roots into the Mississippi soil of her extended family. She still travels “down South” today from her longtime home in Frederick, Maryland, where she lives with her family and works as a freelance writer. She also teaches writing and oral history workshops—sharing with children how all history is really biography, and how every person’s story is important. Freedom Summer is her first book.

Jerome Lagarrigue was born and grew up in Paris, France, in a family of artists. Mr. Lagarrigue is the illustrator of Freedom Summer as well as My Man Blue by Nikki Grimes, and his work has also appeared in the New Yorker and on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he teaches drawing and painting at Parsons School of Design and lives in Brooklyn, New York.