Natacha Seijas is a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. As a young woman, she came to America from Cuba, searching for the freedom that the communist revolution had stolen from her and millions of other Cubans. She attended St. Thomas University in Havana and Miami Dade College. She has worked with Switchboard of Miami and the Mental Health Association, nonprofit organizations that provide crisis counseling and wellness services. In those roles, she learned long ago that childhood bullying can have consequences that extend long into adulthood for both the bullies and their victims. In addition, Natacha has worked for the YWCA and the YMCA, from which she recently retired. She was also in local government in South Florida for 25 years. Natacha's heritage of caring about children, their education, and their well-being is practically in her DNA. Her mother was a part of the first class of college-trained social workers to graduate from the University of Havana. * * * Stephen Cody is a product of the writing program at Florida State University, where he specialized in fiction writing. However, he learned about children's books through on-the-job training. He's an involved dad who read to all of his children as they were growing up. Almost every weekend when his children were young, the family would trundle off to one of the bookstores in town, where each of kid would pick out a book of his or her very own. Those books became the stuff of hundreds upon hundreds of bedtimes stories. Cody's children demanded that each character's part be read in a unique accent or voice. From all of that, Cody learned what makes a good story and what makes a story great. He has written and illustrated three prior children's books: There's An Elephant Following Me, ABC's of the Universe, and Santa's New Home. In addition, he has written The Peasant Prince, the first volume in The Midnight Realm Chronicles, a young adult/crossover series. He is also the author of Soulless and the bestselling thriller, Lying in State. Steve lives on the steamy shores of Biscayne Bay with his wife, Rita, his four children, two dogs, and a peahen named "Matilda."