Ray Young Bear is a member of the Mesquakie tribe, formerly known as Sauk and Pox. Born November 12, 1950, he has been writing since 1966. Widely anthologized and published frequently in literary magazines, he is the author of a book of poetry, WINTER OF THE SALAMANDER (Harper and Row, 1980). To quote from the jacket notes: "Ray Young Bear began thinking his poems in his native tongue then translating them verbatim. Through ten years of writing he has refined his technique so that the poems while no longer word-for-word translations have become, in essence, an authentic Native American experience, finalized in English." He currently is living in the Mesquakie settlement in Tama, Iowa and putting together an anthology of traditional stories from the Midwest.

Greg Young-Ing is a member of Opasquiak Cree Nation and has a Master's degree from the Institute of Canadian Studies, Carleton University. He is the former editor of Gatherings: The En'owkin International Journal of First North American Peoples, and a former instructor at the En'owkin International School of Writing. Greg presently resides in Penticton, British Columbia, where he is the manager of Theytus Books, the first Aboriginal publishing house in Canada.

Youyouseyah (Getting Ready) and his sister, Tawa Mana, are a brother-sister writing team. Their literature is of their Hopi-Tewa heritage.

[Gertrude Simmons Bonnin] 1876-1938: Zitkala-Sa was born at the Yankton Sioux Agency in South Dakota. Her mother was a full-blood Sioux, while her father seems to have been an Anglo-American. She attended a Quaker mission school for native children in Wabash, Indiana, then completed her studies at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. Bonnin was active in Indian rights, at both local and national levels, forming the National Council of American Indiens, a major Indian rights organization that kept Native people from diverse regions abreast of legislative concerns and provided them with a centralized focus for a variety of local issues. She published sketches and short stories in several popular magazines and two book-length collections. Old Indian Legends and American Indian Stories, a collection of her fiction and sketches. Bonnin collaborated with William E. Hanson on an Indian opera, Sun Dance, that was selected as the 1937 Opera of the Year by the New York Light Opera Guild.

Robert Zuboff, a chief of the Beaver Clan at Angoon, Admiralty Island, who spent hours sharing tribal lore with the children and coauthored Tlingit Tales: Potlatch and Totem Pole with Lorle and Lorie K Harris.