Aria Ungerer worked closely with her father, artist Tomi Ungerer, for over a decade.  Projects they collaborated on encompassed books, museum and gallery exhibitions, various public events and film projects.  She has co-curated numerous exhibitions of his work including most recently an exhibition of his collages at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris based on the theme of Waiting for Godot and a retrospective of his work at the Deichtorhalle in Hamburg.  

Aria now manages the Tomi Ungerer Estate and also runs Pictor Productions which is currently producing the second series of Flix, an animated TV series based on the book by Tomi. 

Betsy Bird is the former Youth Materials Specialist of New York Public Library and the current Collection Development Manager of Evanston Public Library. 

Betsy is the co-author of Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children's Literature and is the author of numerous books for kids, including the new picture book Pop! Goes the Nursery Rhyme, illustrated by Andrea Tsurumi. 

She podcasts with her sister about picture books (Fuse 8 n' Kate), and reviews for Kirkus. 

An Emmy and NAACP Image Award-winning writer, producer and showrunner, Brad Bernstein is the Chief Content Officer for Texas Crew Productions (TCP) and Asylum Entertainment Group Canada (AEGC). 

Brad spent two decades producing in New York, Los Angeles and Austin before moving his family to an island in the Salish Sea in British Columbia to open the Canadian office of Texas Crew Productions. In his role at the company, Brad oversees the creative planning, hiring and execution of TCP projects in both Production and Development. 

TCP’s current slate of unscripted series and specials includes documentary projects for Netflix, Peacock, Hulu and Freeform (Disney + in Canada), Investigation Discovery (ID), Oxygen, ESPN, Paramount +, Fox Nation and Discovery.

Gary Groth is an American comic book editor, publisher and critic. He is editor-in-chief of The Comics Journal, a co-founder of Fantagraphics Books, and founder of the Harvey Awards.

In 1976 Groth founded Fantagraphics Books, Inc. with Mike Catron and Kim Thompson, and took over an adzine named The Nostalgia Journal—quickly renaming it The Comics Journal. Groth's Comics Journal applied rigorous critical standards to comic books. It featured lengthy, freewheeling interviews with comics professionals, often conducted by Groth himself. 

Beginning in 1979, Fantagraphics began publishing comics, starting with Jay Disbrow's The Flames of Gyro. They gained wider recognition in 1982 by publishing the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets, and moved on to such critically acclaimed and award-winning series as Acme Novelty Library, Eightball, and Hate.

Jon Agee is the author/illustrator of many books for children, including Terrific, Milo's Hat Trick, and The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau, along with a series of popular wordplay books, among them, Go Hang a Salami! I'm a Lasagna Hog!

He grew up along the Hudson River in Nyack, New York, and went to college at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City, where he studied painting and filmmaking.

K-Fai Steele is a children’s book author and illustrator who grew up in a house built in the 1700s with a printing press her father bought from a magician. She wrote and illustrated All Eyes on Ozzy! and A Normal Pig and the forthcoming middle grade graphic novel Best Buds. 

She was a James Marshall Fellow at the University of Connecticut, a Brown Handler Writer in Residence at the San Francisco Public Library, and an Ezra Jack Keats/Kerlan Memorial Fellow at the University of Minnesota. Born in Charlton, Massachusetts, she now lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Kate Feiffer is the author of nine highly acclaimed picture books for children and two middle grade novels. Her picture books include Henry the Dog with No Tail, illustrated by her father Jules Feiffer, My Mom is Trying to Ruin My Life, illustrated by Diane Goode, and The Wild Wild Inside, illustrated by Laura Huliska-Beith. 

Kate recently started illustrating herself and is the illustrator of The Lamb Cycle and the upcoming picture book How to Draw a Dog. Morning Pages, a novel for adults, was published in 2024. 

Kate’s writing and illustrations have appeared on NPR and Headline Network News, and been published in LitHub, Blue Dot Magazine, the Martha’s Vineyard Times, among other publications. Since 2014, Kate has been the event producer for the writer’s festival Islanders Write. Kate divides her time between Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and New York city. www.katefeiffer.com

Lisa Brown is a New York Times bestselling illustrator, writer, and cartoonist whose picture books include The Airport Book, The Hospital Book, Mummy Cat by Marcus Ewert, and Goldfish Ghost by Lemony Snicket. Her comics include The Phantom Twin, a graphic novel, and Long Story Short, a collection of comic strips. 

She teaches at the California College of the Arts and chairs the board of 826 Valencia in San Francisco. 

Her latest picture book is The Moving Book.

Maria Russo is Editor-at-Large at Union Square Kids, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, where she acquires and edits picture books. 

She was the founding editorial director of Minerva, an imprint of Astra Books for Young Readers. Maria previously worked as a cultural journalist and served for several years as Children's Books Editor for the New York Times, assigning, editing, and writing reviews, essays, and feature stories about children’s literature. 

She is the co-author of How to Raise a Reader (Workman, 2019). 

Philip Nel is University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University. The author or co-editor of 15 books on children’s literature and/or comics, Nel is an occasional guest on media programs, and was once a clue on the game show Jeopardy. 

His Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books (2017) was one of the catalysts for Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ 2021 decision to stop publishing six Dr. Seuss books that contain racist imagery.  In April of this year, it was one of 381 books removed from the US Naval Academy Library. 

Nel’s most recent book is How to Draw the World: Harold and the Purple Crayon and the Making of a Children’s Classic (2024).

Steven Heller is the co-chair and co-founder emeritus with Lita Talarico of the MFA Design: Designer As Entrepreneur program at the School of Visual Arts, NYC.  He was an art director and a Senior Art Director of the New York Times for over 30 years – starting with the OpEd page and The Times Book Review section. He was “Visuals” columnist for the Book Review, “Graphic Content” columnist for the Times’ T-Style and contributed monthly essays to 2008 feature, “Campaign Stops”. 

He regularly wrote obituaries for the Times on important graphic designers, cartoonists and illustrators. His longtime association as contributing editor with Print Magazine has lasted over 40 years (where his online column The Daily Heller appears).  He is the author, co-author, producer and editor of over 200 books on the histories and practice of graphic design, typography, illustration, satiric art and pop and visual culture themes.

Susan Hirschman is a legendary editor whose career spanned nearly 50 years and produced some of the best-loved children's books of the 20th century.

She worked for a variety of publishers, beginning with a secretarial job in the children's department at Alfred A. Knopf. She spent ten years at Harper & Row, where she worked under Ursula Nordstrom, and then became editor-in-chief of the children's department at Macmillan. Hirschman started Greenwillow Books at William Morrow in 1974, and in 1999 the imprint was absorbed into HarperCollins. Hirschman retired from Greenwillow in 2001.

Among the authors and illustrators Hirschman published are Tomi Ungerer, Kevin Henkes, Arnold and Anita Lobel, Sid Fleischman, Donald Crews and Ann Jonas, Robin McKinley, and Jack Prelutsky.