Lana Button is from the tiny border town of St. Stephen, New Brunswick. She grew up with a passion to perform, spending hours singing into her skipping-rope handle to large crowds of imaginary people. Lana studied acting and performed in front of theatergoing crowds and on TV and film sets in Montreal and Vancouver. But when she began studying early childhood education, Lana fell in love with the magic of picture books and began writing. She strives to tell self-esteem-boosting stories that give children something to cheer about!#Lana loves author visits and presentations. She has had the pleasure of presenting to large crowds of non-imaginary children in school settings, libraries and festivals, from Saskatchewan’s Festival of Words to St. Lucia’s Rainforest of Reading. She was also a proud touring author for TD Canadian Children’s Book Week.#Lana works with literary organizations that support children through books, such as IBBY Canada, First Book Canada and the One World School House. She and her husband live in Burlington, Ontario, with their doting dog and their demanding cat. Lana has three amazing daughters who are all grown up, but will thankfully still listen to picture books.

Hadley Dyer began her career as a children’s bookseller and reviewer in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She now lives in Toronto, where she divides her time between writing, editing and teaching. Her previous books include an award-winning young adult novel and a dozen nonfiction titles on a range of topics, from manatees to baseball. She is a regular contributor to magazines such as Owl, Chickadee and Toronto Life, and teaches in the publishing program at Ryerson University.~ ~Hadley has traveled as far as Tanzania to lead workshops for children’s book writers and research her books. Back at home, she spends time every day in Toronto’s public spaces, walking her dog and jostling for sidewalk space with the kids who hang out in her neighborhood. She never tells them to move along.

James Leck was born in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in 1973. At the time, his hobbies included eating, sleeping and pooping his pants. Since then, much has changed.#He has worked as a high school teacher in Canada, Japan and Kuwait, and has had the good fortune to travel extensively. Some of his favorite stories from his travels include the time he accidentally ordered an entire chicken (and only a chicken) for his dinner in Korea; the time all his clothes, backpack and towel were dragged out to sea by a rogue wave in Guam; and the time he accidentally paid $40 for a bottle of apple juice in Oman. His travels have taught him to expect the unexpected and to roll with the waves life sends you.#Three things influenced him to write the Jack Lime mysteries: Scooby-Doo, Inspector Jacques Clouseau and Sherlock Holmes. However, Jack is based on the hard-boiled detectives of the 1940s and ’50s. James always loved those mysteries because the detectives didn’t solve the crimes through brilliant deduction, but rather through sheer determination and grit.#His latest book, After Dark, is a small salute to the great horror stories and movies he read and watched growing up. Charlie Harker, the hero in After Dark, has a passion for sleeping in, napping and avoiding work at all costs, and James has to admit that these qualities might be based on his own quest for absolute laziness during his summer vacations growing up.#Currently, James lives in Dartmouth with his wife and two children. He still enjoys sleeping and eating but has moved beyond pooping his pants.

Peter McMahon knew he wanted to be a writer by grade 10, the year he started working for his high school paper in Peterborough, Ontario. In 1996, he was accepted into the journalism program at Toronto’s Ryerson University. Since then, Peter has written and produced for some of Canada’s largest media outlets, including CTV, the Toronto Star, the kids magazine YES Mag and Discovery Channel, where he spent seven years as a new media producer and later, senior online producer.~While at Discovery, Peter pioneered the first TV-quality live webcasts of science events online. Serving as producer, editor and sometimes host, the productions ranged from live video coverage of the 2007 lunar eclipse to the 2008 university concrete canoe challenge (co-hosted by Survivorman’s Les Stroud and canoe author Kevin Callan), to the FIRST Robotics Canadian championships, to a generation-3 night-vision webcast of the Perseid meteor shower — from inside a meteor crater!~As a science journalist, Peter has travelled the world and met some fascinating people: He has covered a space shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida; helped unearth the bones of a giant carnivorous tyrannosaur in the Alberta badlands; witnessed the reconstruction of a 400-year-old sunken warship in Sweden; walked along the path of a photon in a particle accelerator; and travelled 2 km (4 CN towers!) underground in search of the universe’s missing mass.~In his travels, he has met and interviewed “science celebrities” from primate researcher Jane Goodall to James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) to Anousheh Ansari (the world’s first female space tourist). He has interviewed “daredevil billionaire” Sir Richard Branson and dozens of American and Canadian astronauts; and he has also worked with science hosts Jay Ingram, Ziya Tong, Natasha Stillwell and sometimes-host of Daily Planet and Daily Planet specials Ed Robertson.~Since leaving Discovery and CTV full-time in 2009, Peter has gone on to cover the health science of the Olympics at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games for CTVolympics.ca ~He is currently working on a number of writing projects with magazines, web sites and the federal government, as well as a series of books on vehicles of the future for Kids Can Press.~The ideas for the experiments in his books come from years of creating such activities for hands-on children’s science programs at museums. While working on his latest book, Peter tested his experiments out in the “lab” of his children’s programs, getting feedback on what rocks, what doesn’t and having a lot of fun along the way.~An avid backyard astronomer, Peter writes, produces and speaks on topics from do-it-yourself science, to science promotion in Canada, to wilderness stargazing, to space tourism and our future in the cosmos.

Kyo is a self-professed spork — her father is British and her mother is Japanese. She was born in England, where she enjoyed a brief theatrical career in London’s West End. Little did she know when she appeared in The King and I that her one line — “I believe in snow” — would be prophetic. At age four, in the midst of a very snowy winter, she and her parents moved to Toronto, Canada. #Later Kyo attended university, where she did not study dentistry or architecture (much to the great vexation and sorrow of her parents), but instead pursued a degree in Art History. She followed this degree with another vexing degree in Cultural Studies (her poor parents). Alas, though she acquired several useful skills as a longtime student (e.g. pencil sharpening, binder organization and laundry folding), neither degree led to particularly enriching employment. This is just as well because there is nothing like being hungry and bored and underemployed to fire up one’s imagination.#Kyo now resides in Toronto, where she shares a home with two children, a cat, a musician and a lot of books. In addition to writing, she likes to listen to music, watch old movies, do yoga, make art and play around in her bright, open kitchen. Spork, the story of a mixed kitchen utensil and Kyo’s debut book for children, was originally conceived with her husband to celebrate the birth of their first child. As well as writing for children, Kyo is a novelist and a visual-arts writer.