Growing Hearts & Community in Picture Books

The daughter of a printer, Carole Boston Weatherford was practically born with ink in her blood. She began writing at age 6 and soon after saw her poems in print. Her 80-plus books have garnered 2 NAACP Image Awards and 18 American Library Association Youth Media Awards, including a Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Award and 4 Caldecott Honors. Her career achievements have been recognized with the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Nonfiction Award from the Children’s Book Guild and induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. A retired English professor, she lives in Maryland.

Colette Hiller is a writer, arts producer and mother of twins. Her arts projects have reached hundreds of thousands of participants – she is the woman who put pianos and ping-pong tables in countless locations across the UK, and is also the mind behind the hit Talking Statues project.

B. Sharise Moore is a multi-genre author, teaching artist, lecturer, workshop facilitator, and Poetry Editor for FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. In 2021, MV Media released her YA Afrofuturist novel, Dr. Marvellus Djinn’s Odd Scholars and in 2022, she curated and edited Conjuring Worlds: An Afrofuturist Textbook for Middle and High School Students. Her debut picture book, A City Dream illustrated by Trudi-Ann Hemans, was released in October 2025 by Harper Collins. Moore’s forthcoming books include The Marvelous Magic of Ellen Armstrong (Penguin Random House/Kokila Spring 2027), Curious Creatures of African Folklore (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Fall 2027), and Golden: A Story of Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa (Harper Collins Summer 2028). She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband and their two inquisitive children.

Shadra Strickland studied design, writing, and illustration at Syracuse University and later completed her M.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She won the Ezra Jack Keats Award and the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent in 2009 for her work on her first picture book, Bird, written by Zetta Elliott. Strickland co-illustrated Our Children Can Soar, winner of a 2010 NAACP Image Award. She has published with Lee and Low Books, Simon and Schuster, Random House, Candlewick, Chronicle Books, and Little, Brown. Her books have received recognition from the American Library Association, Junior Library Guild, and other prominent literary organizations. She is an agent-at-large with Painted-Words Represents and is represented by Lori Nowicki. Shadra is currently the Chair of Illustration at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.