Firebirds Soaring

Nancy Farmer has written three Newbery Honor books: The Ear, the Eye and the Arm; A Girl Named Disaster; and The House of the Scorpion, which also won the National Book Award and the Printz Honor. Other books include The Lord of Opium, The Sea of Trolls, The Land of the Silver Apples, The Islands of the Blessed, Do You Know Me, The Warm Place, and three picture books for young children. She grew up on the Arizona-Mexico border and now lives with her family in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona.

Carol Emshwiller grew up in Michigan and in France and for many years divided her time between New York and California. Her stories appeared in literary and science fiction magazines for over forty years and were published in a number of critically acclaimed collections including The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller and In the Time of War/Master of the Road to Nowhere. Emshwiller’s work has been honored with two Nebula Awards and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. She was also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two literary grants from New York State. She died in 2019.

"I grew up as an odd kid in the mountains of Montana," writes Laurel Winter. "I didn’t have wings, but I was klutzy and bookwormish and didn’t always fit in. I attended a one-room country school for eight grades." Today Laurel writes poems and short stories, and she loves to paint and draw and sculpt. She says this novel began as a short story, but its plot surprised her. Together with her husband and twin sons, she lives in Rochester, Minnesota. GROWING WINGS is her first novel.