Tom Nancy

MAC BARNETT, the 2025-2026 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, is a New York Times-bestselling author of stories for children. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has sold more than five million copies worldwide. Mac’s books have won many prizes, including two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Awards, three E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, Germany’s Jugendliteraturpreis, China’s Chen Bochui International Children’s Literature Award, The Netherlands’ Zilveren Griffel, and Italy’s Premio Orbil. He is the co-creator, with Jon Klassen, of the Looking at Picture Books Substack, as well as Shape Island, a stop-motion animated series on Apple TV+, based on their bestselling Shapes series of picture books. Mac lives in Oakland, California.

X. FANG is a Taiwanese-American illustrator. Her picture books include Broken, a New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award winner; We Are Definitely Human, recipient of the Ezra Jack Keats Illustrator Award; and her debut picture book, Dim Sum Palace, which won the Society of Illustrators’ Dilys Evans Founder’s Award and was named one of Slate’s 25 Greatest Picture Books of the Past 25 Years, among other honors. She lives in Midcoast Maine.