Dave Cameron began his writing life as a journalist, and his profiles and essays have appeared in several publications, including Reader’s Digest, the Walrus and Cottage Life.#Dave does some of his writing at a family cottage on the shores of Lake Huron. The century-old building is falling down in a charming way, and its many nooks and shadowy crannies are home to many, many critters. Spiders and mice are quite comfortable there. Squirrels stash food in the roof. There’s a hole in the wall by the front door that makes a perfect nest for the very small and very loud house wren. The cottage, is, really, their place. Fortunately, none of these creatures seem to mind when humans drop by.#Dave spends most of the year in Hamilton, Ontario, with his partner and their son.

Cathy Ballou Mealey enjoys all kinds of fun vacation activities, including swimming, reading and sharing sweet treats. When she is not writing or reading, she volunteers for schools and programs that support individuals with autism and intellectual disabilities. Cathy likes dill pickle pops and chocolate ice cream, but not at the same time! She lives with her husband, son and daughter north of Boston, Massachusetts, where she delights in watching silly squirrel antics and is waiting patiently for a sloth to appear. #Instagram @catballoumealey X/Twitter @catballoumealey Bluesky @catballoumealey

Carrie S. Allen grew up in the Colorado mountains, at 10,000 feet elevation. She worked as a certified athletic trainer, first in a high school, and then in collegiate sports medicine. She lives in Colorado Springs with her husband, kids and dogs. When she’s not acting as an unpaid chauffeur, she writes about athletes. Not female athletes, but athletes who happen to be female.

Laura Farina grew up surrounded by stories – the ones read to her, the ones told to her and the ones she wrote for family and friends. She created her first publications in elementary school. She illustrated them, stuck shiny gold award stickers to their covers and sent them to readers by mail. Sometimes, when family members are cleaning out their cupboards they will return to Laura one of these publications – a diamond heist perpetuated by cats, a blatant rip-off of the Wizard of Oz, a piece of biting satire about the 1993 federal election. They serve as reminders that she has always been happiest when she’s making and sharing stories.#In her early teens, Laura fell in love with poetry. Her first two not-published-by-her books were collections of poetry for adults. She returned to writing picture books when her father turned sixty and she needed to get him a present. Laura’s father spent her childhood telling her wild stories – magicians, pirates and bubblegum trees – and she believed every one. For her present, she decided to sit down and make a story of all these stories, then turn it into a book like she used to do when she was a kid. She had so much fun writing it and began seeing new ideas for picture books everywhere.#This is the Path the Wolf Took is inspired by a young visual artist named Ida. When Ida was much younger than she is today, she created a wonderful scribbly piece of art and showed it to Laura saying, “This is the path the wolf took through the woods.” The line stuck in Laura’s head and she kept coming back to it until slowly, over time, it turned into a story.#Laura lives in Vancouver with her husband, who is an actor and puppeteer, and her son, who is really into cement trucks. She helps other writers find their stories as the coordinator of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.~Instagram: @lauraeafarina

Kathy Stinson has loved reading books since before she started school. Her parents had to take her to the public library often.#Kathy sorted mail, taught elementary school, and worked as a waitress before it occurred to her that she might like writing books, too. An argument with her then three-year-old daughter led to the writing of her first book, Red Is Best. It quickly became a classic and was soon followed by Big or Little?, which was inspired by her son. They were two of the first picture books for toddlers published in Canada.#Kathy has since written a wide range of books: picture books, nonfiction, young adult fiction, historical fiction, horror, biography, series books, and stories in anthologies and magazines. Her book The Man with the Violin won the prestigious TD Children’s Literature Award.#Kathy has enjoyed the privilege of meeting with readers in every province and territory of Canada, in the United States, Britain, Liberia and Korea. She has worked as a freelance editor for a number of writers and publishers, and has served as a Writer-in-Residence for several library systems in Ontario. She has led writing workshops all across Canada and even in Africa.#An avid amateur photographer and a volunteer reader and technician at the CNIB Recording Studio, Kathy is the mother of two grown children, stepmother of two more and the grandmother of six. She currently lives in Rockwood, Ontario, with her partner, Peter, and their dog, Georgia.#A longtime believer in IBBY’s philosophy of “international understanding through children’s books,” Kathy is donating a portion of her earnings from The Lady with the Books to IBBY’s Children in Crisis Fund.~Instagram: @thekathystinson~Twitter: @thekathystinson