BRENDA RANDOLPH

Brenda Randolph is the founder and director of Africa Access. She is a graduate of North Carolina Central University, holds a Master's degree in African Studies from Howard University and a Master's in Information Services from the University of Maryland, College Park. She has worked as a library media specialist in Virginia, Massachusetts and Maryland. Brenda received the Francois Manchuelle Award in 2001 for innovative work promoting the cause of African Studies in the K-12 community. The award is given in memory of Dr. Manchuelle, an Africanist historian, who perished in the crash of TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996. In 2007 at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the African Studies Association, she received the National Outreach Council Award of Appreciation for outstanding service and commitment to promoting the teaching of Africa through the Children's Africana Book Award. Brenda is a major contributor to Sankofa Journal, a peer-reviewed journal edited by Meena Khorana and published annually by the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland. Sankofa includes scholarly articles on emerging trends in African and African Diaspora juvenile literatures and in-depth book reviews of books nominated by U.S. publishers for the Children's Africana Book Awards.

HELON HABILA

Helon Habila was born in Nigeria. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before he moved to England to become the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. In 2002 he published his first novel, Waiting for an Angel. Waiting for an Angel has been translated into many languages including Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and French. His writing has won many prizes including the Caine Prize, 2001, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2003. In 2005/2006 he became the Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College, NY.

He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2006 he co-edited the British Council's anthology, New Writing 14. His second novel, Measuring Time, was published in 2007, it won the Virginia Library Foundation Fiction Award, 2008, and was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, 2008. His third novel, Oil on Water, was published in the US in 2011. His anthology, The Granta Book of the African Short Story just came out in September, 2011. Habila teaches Creative Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and three children.

ELINOR SISULU

Zimbabwean-born writer, human rights activist and political analyst, Elinor Sisulu combines training in history, English literature, development studies and feminist theory. She was an academic researcher in Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Labor from 1980 – 87 after which she worked in the Lusaka office of the International Labor Organization (ILO) on its program of assistance to Southern African liberation movements. She moved to South Africa with her husband Max Sisulu in 1991. In 1994 she wrote an award winning children’s book The Day Gogo Went to Vote depicting democratic elections in South Africa. Her biography on her parents-in-law, Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime secured her the prestigious 2003 Noma Award for publishing in Africa. From 2003 to 2009, Elinor worked on Zimbabwean democracy initiatives. She has been active in various children’s literature initiatives and is a founding member of the recently-established Puku Children’s Literature Foundation that seeks to increase the quantity and quality of books and educational content for children in Southern Africa. She lives in Pretoria with her husband Max and three sons, Vuyisile, Duma and Sandile.

MESHACK ASARE

Meshack Asare was born in Ghana and studied Art at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. He is a successful author and illustrator of books for children and young people with his books translated into a number of languages. He won the NOMA Prize for publishing in Africa in 1982 and has since, won other prestigious National and International awards including the UNESCO Prize for Tolerance in Literature for Children and Young People. He now lives in Germany.

CAROL MITCHELL

Born in Nevis, St. Kitts, Carol has lived in several Caribbean countries. She spent a large part of her formative years in Trinidad, where one of her favorite pastimes was competing with her father to see who could compose the best humorous lyrics to existing songs. This was just the beginning of her interest in creative writing. Back in St. Kitts, Carol began a more serious side of her writing career in high school when she wrote public service pieces and participated in several debating competitions. After leaving high school to pursue further studies in Barbados and the United States, Carol focused her efforts on developing her information technology and business management skills, while making every effort possible to write and participate in public speaking.

In 2007, on a visit to Brimstone Hill, Carol was struck by the monument’s beauty and its potential as the setting for a children’s book. The result was Adventure at Brimstone Hill and the birth of the Caribbean Adventure Series. Currently, Carol lives in Ghana, West Africa. She writes about her experiences as a “trailing spouse” in West Africa on the Obroni section of the website, kittivisianlife.com. She also writes about writing on NovelSpaces.blogspot.com. See all of her musings at caribbeanadventureseries.wordpress.com

TANJA GALETTI

Tanja Galetti was born in Southern Germany but has lived in Ghana for the past 18 years. She earned her first Master’s degree in African Linguistics from University of Bayreuth (Germany) and is currently working towards her second Master’s in Educational Technology through Indiana State University, Terre Haute. She completed the Library Media Services Certification Program at Indiana State University and is in her fifth year as Elementary Library Media Specialist at Lincoln Community School(LCS), Accra, Ghana. At LCS she engages with over 300 children, ages 3-11, from over 50 different countries. She is passionate about kindling their passion for reading and constantly seeks new reading materials that ignite her young readers’ interest. At the same time she aims at developing a multicultural collection, which allows readers to connect with their home or host culture, Ghana, as well as with other cultures from around the world. Tanja also collaborates with classroom teachers on the integration of information literacy skills, thereby exploring technology and Web 2.0 tools (find her on Twitter as tgaletti and Shelfari). Tanja co-authored an annotated bibliography on Nubian Languages and participated in an oral history project on beads in Ghana, contributing also to the resulting publication The Bead is Constant.