Leonard Marcus
One of the world’s leading authorities on children’s books and their illustration. His highly acclaimed books include Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon; Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom; The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy; Pass It Down: Five Picture-Book Families Make Their Mark; and, for young children, Oscar: The Big Adventure of a Little Sock Monkey, co-authored and illustrated by his wife, Amy Schwartz. Leonard has been Parenting magazine’s book critic since the monthly’s founding in 1987, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and other publications. He is the literary director of The Night Kitchen Radio Theater and one of the founding trustees of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Visit his web site at: www.leonardmarcus.com.

Barbara Elleman
She served as editor of the Children’s section of Booklist magazine and then as founder and editor-in-chief of Book Links: Connecting Books, Libraries, and Classrooms, both published by the American Library Association. Following her retirement from ALA, she was named Distinguished Scholar of Children’s Literature at Marquette University. Earlier in her career she worked as a school library media specialist in high schools, junior highs, elementary schools, and served as a children’s librarian in the Denver Public Library.
Barbara has been a judge for the Caldecott Medal, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Awards, the Golden Kite Awards, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, which was given to Eric Carle. She participated in the National Council of Teachers of English Excellence in Poetry committee, the U.S. Hans Christian Andersen committee. Barbara currently serves on the national advisory board for the Mazza Museum for International Art from Picture Books and is a trustee of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.
Her awards include the Jeremiah Ludington Award presented by the Educational Paperback Association and the Hope S. Dean Award given by the Foundation for Children’s Literature.
In 1999, Putnam published her first book, Tomie dePaola, His Art and His Stories. Since then she has written Holiday House: The First Sixty-Five Years (Holiday House), and Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art (Houghton). In 2004, her profile of Steven Kellogg appeared in a collection of Kellogg books entitled, Pinkerton and Friends (Dial).