Maria Chernobrovkina was born in Moscow, Russia. She loves both nature and painting as far back as she can remember. When she had to choose between becoming  a geographer and a painter, Maria decided… to do both – and got two degrees. After graduation she taught art and ecology to kids aged 3-15 and then started creating books. Her favourite techniques are collage and watercolor. Maria believes good books should not only entertain but teach as well. In her work she mostly focuses on nature and ecology. Maria has taken part in several exhibitions in Russia and Europe.”

She is an artist, designer and author.Her art is full with colour and reflects her view on life – “life is full with miracles, and should be taken with grain of humor. She is a very creative and a multi-talented person and is always busy with creating if not with pen, pencil, brush or any other media, then you will find her behind her computer and trusted Wacom board. She specializes in both traditional and digital techniques, and loves to mix in between them, to get to a more sharp look. In the rare cases that she is not working, she loves to travel to new places to expand her horizon and can be frequently found in China, Spain, Portugal or any other way the wind blows.

Mark Tedesco, author of That Undeniable Longing, I am John I am Paul, Lessons and Beliefs, The Dog on the Acropolis and Loving Hoping Believing, is an educator and author living in Los Angeles. His latest work is entitled She Seduced Me: A Love Affair with Rome. Mark lived in Rome for eight years and maintains a strong bond with, and passion for, the city. The author loves to engage his students in his love for history, literature and travel.

Danielle loves to work in colored pencils on watercolor paper, in part because it adds a rough textural element, and also because it’s too frightening to actually use watercolor paint on watercolor paper. Someday she plans on taking a course in watercolors and hopefully overcoming her fear of them. Until that day, however, she will continue to produce colorful, whimsical creations much to the delight of her family and friends. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and her two sons, who steal her colored pencils.

Bernie Leonard lives in West Yorkshire, England with her two amazing children and her soulmate Simon. She is a psychology graduate and a qualified teacher of Mindfulness. After teaching Psychology successfully over two decades, she re-trained as a Mindfulness teacher and now runs her own well-being business, Mindful Me Health & Well-Being Ltd. 

Conny Vischer was born in Switzerland. In her childhood she loves reading till late at night and in her early teenage years she started to write short stories which ended in a bin after a few years.
After her studies for nurse she restarted writing and started to travel around the United Kingdom and fell in love with this beautiful country, especially Scotland.
She finds ideas for her stories when she’s sitting on the shore of any water or on a walk and letting her thoughts wander to the music. Even while writing, music is a constant companion. It is as if the notes become words whispered to her. Compositions that turn into novels.

Joe Gray is a field naturalist who lives in the catchment of the River Colne on the island known as Great Britain. He has master’s degrees in Zoology from Cambridge and Forestry from Bangor and is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society. Joe is also a Co-founder of The Ecological Citizen (a peer-reviewed, nature-centred journal), Chair of GENIE (the Global Ecocentric Network for Implementing Ecodemocracy), and a Knowledge Advisor on ecological ethics for the United Nations’ Harmony with Nature programme.

Alina is a half British, half German artist with a BA in Illustration from Falmouth University. She mostly works with inks but loves to try out all types of traditional media. Having grown up in the English countryside, her work is greatly inspired by nature and animals. Her greatest passion is her children’s books and bringing her characters and colourful scenes to life for all to enjoy. As well as painting, she enjoys travelling, adventuring by the seaside and baking.

George M. Johnson became an activist when he was a Grade Five student in Ontario. Since 1991, he has been the Chair of Global and Community Action at Kamloops United Church, and actually wrote and performed in the play and anti-fashion show described in How Hope Became an Activist. He is an award-winning writer, passionate about telling stories with humour to create empathy and provoke change. In 2019, he received the Y.M.C.A. Peace Medal for his social justice work and writing. He is currently a Professor and Chair of the English and Modern Languages Department at Thompson Rivers University. 

Andrew took on various roles over his lifetime – archaeologist, soldier, father, sustainability activist, and many more. He became interested in ecovillages in 2001. In his words, he was blown away by a world where human relationships were at the centre of existence. The particular way of existing in ecovillages where how you show up and contribute is more important than money and what you do for a living inspired him immensely. He also regarded it as one of the solutions to find meaningful work, water, food, energy, and social security. He has been a pioneer in two ecovillages and is currently a board trustee for the Global Ecovillage Network.

Sacha Baldwin is a creative Illustrator & Designer from Cambridgeshire with professional studio experience in Children’s Crafts, Stationary, and the Seasonal Craft Industry.  With a Bachelors in Illustration, and an extensive portfolio of exciting projects, Sacha enjoys working in traditional mediums such as watercolour, collage and monoprint, also making engaging, playful images using digital platforms.

An avid collector of Children’s books, and an amateur photographer, Sacha is inspired by nature, passionately capturing the beautiful skies where she lives.  Sacha enjoys collaborating on projects and regularly contributes to a drawing group with fellow creatives.

Inas Younis was born in Mosul, Iraq and emigrated to the United States as a child in 1982. An independent journalist and commentator, Inas writes on religion and politics for various magazines and websites. She is the co-founder of the first chapter of the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom in Kansas City and served on the board of this national organization, based in New Jersey. She is an alumna of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

In the realm of civic leadership, Inas currently serves on the board of the  KCPublic theatre and an active member of People of Faith for Peace.

Sandra Pomar is an exceptionally busy mom of five spectacular children. Her previous work entails being an Educator in both Canada and the United Kingdom. Sandra’s undying compassion for children has led her to volunteer for The Make a Wish Foundation, POPS-Les Enfants de la Rue, Christmas in July children’s toy donations & the NSPCC. Her passion for writing has become a reality last year when she embarked on her journey as an author for Women’s Perinatal Health, and as an avid lover of children’s books, she hopes for her new stories to be a fresh change for children globally. Sandra aspires to spread the word that “a little respect and compassion go a long way,” hence her motto “Every child should go to bed at night feeling safe, loved, and well cared for.” 

Her mission and desire in life is to help children worldwide experience laughter, peace and joy.

Edna Gee is a South African artist and English teacher currently living and working in Milan. From an early age, she was exposed to her country’s rich fauna and flora through regular trips to the national park and her grandfather’s stories about birds and animals. Her family also had a wide variety of pets including a pig, chickens, cats, birds and a dog. She completed a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Pretoria after which she moved to Milan to pursue further studies in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti. She has been working with Isola Art Center since 2012.

Dhwani Gosalia is an independent Graphic Designer and Illustrator from Mumbai. She does both digital and traditional illustrations. From an early age, she knew what she wanted to do for the rest
of her life. Making the world of plain boring text to interesting and engaging visuals. She has graduated from Rachana Sansad College of Mumbai in Bachelors of Fine Art and Craft (BFA) with a specialization in Illustration. She is commited to make reading exciting for kids visually and encourage them to grow while she discovers and experiments with diferent styles and techniques. Besides children’s books she loves all things colourful, nature and desserts.

Teena Raffa-Mulligan is a reader, writer and daydream believer who believes there is magic in every day if we choose to find it. She grew up in an English/Italian family in Western Australia, surrounded by natural story tellers whose tales about their lives captured her imagination. Books also opened a window into the world of make believe and her ambition to be a writer was born at an early age.

Altierra – alias Alessandra Ciogli – was born in Italy and graduated from the School of Arts of Verona.

She collaborated with public elementary schools through art projects for the development of creativity in children. She worked as a photographer and graphic designer, moving on to her first love, painting.

She has traveled extensively, being interested in nature, farming, and other cultures, discovering  meditation in India, and becoming yoga teacher to adults and childrens. 

Nola is an Australian children’s book author, about to debut her YA novel, ‘Enough Is Enough’. She is a retired teacher who’s relishing her new found freedom to focus on writing truthful, authentic stories that her readers can escape into. She wants her novels to give hope and courage to anyone doing it tough because of the difficult circumstances they find themselves in. 

Nola is passionate about writing, her family, spending time with friends, travelling the world and championing the underdog. 

After studying in Oxford and London, Simon pursued a conventional career in local government and the third sector during which time he obtained an Open University MBA.  A defining moment came when he and his wife bought a 52 acre plantation woodland in Hertfordshire, England.  Since 2015 they have lived in temporary accommodation on the edge of their wood trying to secure planning permission for a permanent home.  Gradually Simon learned that their wood was not so much a collection of trees as a numinous presence (a Thomas Berry phrase).

Simon’s woodland restoration work has featured in Royal Forestry Society articles and  ECOS, the journal of the British Association of Nature Conservationists (BANC), of which he is a trustee.  In addition to caring for their woodland Simon divides his time making copious cups of tea for his professor wife, small business consultancy work, and caring for a flock of rescue sheep and chickens.

Federica Ambroso was born in Italy, near Verona, in 1993. She is a PhD in Modern Languages, Literature and Cultures. She has a BSc in Modern Literatures from the University of Bologna and a MSc in European Literatures and Cultures from the Universities of Bologna and Thessaloniki.

Ever since she was a child, she has had a passion for writing and reading. She has won 60 literary contests in Italy and Greece. She published a children’s book in Greek (Ο Μάγειρας των Εποχών και η μυστική συνταγή της Άνοιξης) ̶ winner of the 2019 EPOK Book of the Year Award ̶, a bilingual collection of short stories (Με τις βαλίτσες γεμάτες ήλιο /Con le valigie piene di sole), a children’s book in Italian (La grande avventura di Lily Selvaggia), a collection of poems in Veronese dialect (In serca del sol) and a romance novel in Italian (Il canto del meltemi). Other texts have been published in Greek and Italian literary and cultural magazines as well as in anthologies.

She is also a translator and a singer. She loves travelling and dancing.

Alastair McColl is a writer, software developer and sailor, with degrees in English, Philosophy and Computer Science. Alastair lives with his wife, two children and dog in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, on the north eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean. He is currently developing a novel which centres on social life, in a world where most employment is performed through artificially intelligent avatars. He is also creating a graphic novel, as well as children’s books depicting life on the Canadian west coast.

Why don’t we act when we have known the existential danger of climate change for over thirty years? Such are the questions Assoc. Prof. Martin Hultman deal with in his research, praxes and everyday life. Hultman is widely published in energy and climate issues especially notable are the articles ‘The Making of an Environmental Hero: A History of Ecomodern Masculinity, Fuel Cells and Arnold Schwarzenegger’ and ‘A green fatwā? Climate change as a threat to the masculinity of industrial modernity’ then the books Discourses of Global Climate Change, Ecological Masculinities and Men, masculinities and Earth. Contending with the (m)Anthropocene. Hultman leads three research groups analyzing ‘gender and energy’, ‘ecopreneurship in circular economies’ and ‘climate change denial’ at Chalmers University of Technology. As part of his academic work he publish chronicles in a wide range of newspapers, give public lectures on contemporary politics and advice NGO:s as well as governmental agencies.

Pete grew up in the English countryside with a deep appreciation of nature and realising the harm humans are doing to it, he joined Greenpeace to be a volunteer activist, taking part in campaigns and direct actions for the environment. He has now drawn on these remarkable experiences and those of close colleagues to form an exciting compilation of true stories.

Writing credits include blogs for Greenpeace and Plane Stupid, winner of a Flash 500 competition, published in Aftermath Magazine and a debut novel.

Pete now lives off grid in a straw bale house he designed and built with his wife, and 20 Angora rabbits in rural Wales.

Chobela Ndilila is a German Zambian bi-racial writer. She was born and raised in Zambia and spent many years studying abroad in Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany. She hold a Master of Science in Architecture. Over the past several years, she has written short stories depicting life in Africa and Africans in the diaspora. These stories have received online publication with The Booker’s Corner (UK), the Ofi Press Magazine (Mexico) and Litro Magazine (UK). She currently live and work as an architect in Lusaka, Zambia.

Julia is a South African born digital illustrator, with qualifications in graphic design and illustration. She chose to listen to her calling and specialize in illustrating children’s books.

Ever since being a young child, she would always be drawing and wouldn’t be seen without her big case of crayons by her side. Being able to bring books to life with illustrations for the children of today has been very rewarding. She hopes to inspire and uplift a new generation of children with art as she once was as a child.

She has worked on many books – all successfully published nationally and internationally.

Today Julia is living in the sunny city of Gqerberha.

Megan Gregorowski is a South African teacher and author who is passionate about challenging stereotypes in education.

Having discovered a lack of children’s books depicting the Montessori environment in her own classes, she has begun writing her own; books that bring her training in teaching and psychology together to create meaningful, informative narratives.  

Megan loves adventure and being creative. When she’s not teaching or writing away, she enjoys baking, painting and exploring her local beach with her husband, son and dogs.

Jessica has been interested in art and painting from an early age and has a degree within this field in painting, drawing and printmaking. She has previously volunteered at zoos, where she became inspired by wildlife and started painting some of the animals she was working with, and now works with young children in a primary school in Devon. When Jessica’s sister Lorraine asked her to illustrate her wonderful children’s stories, combining her love of animals, art and child education into one project, she couldn’t think of anything better!

Marika Monesi is an Italian artist born in 1992. She has always had a strong passion for drawing and photography and this leads her to choose graphics and photography in high school, where graduated in 2011. She almost immediately starts working as a graphic designer and e-commerce photographer for several companies in the fashion and food industry. In addition to her main job, she works as a cosplay photographer and opened her own shop of stationery products decorated with her drawings, then she decided to take her first steps in children’s publishing, to make one of her dreams come true. She tried many techniques, both digital and traditional, going from hyper realism to childish illustration in order to define her own style. Now, as a good collector of picture books she dreams of adding hers to the library, too!

Jessica has been interested in art and painting from an early age and has a degree within this field in painting, drawing and printmaking. She has previously volunteered at zoos, where she became inspired by wildlife and started painting some of the animals she was working with, and now works with young children in a primary school in Devon. When Jessica’s sister Lorraine asked her to illustrate her wonderful children’s stories, combining her love of animals, art and child education into one project, she couldn’t think of anything better!

Tangea Tansley was born in Zimbabwe and spent her childhood in East Africa before immigrating to Australia in her mid-teens. Following her first marriage, she left Australia to live and work in South Africa, the Middle and Far East, and the United States. When she finally settled back in Perth, the relocations from one continent to another slowed down, but the house-moves didn’t: she has a total of 71 bonafide addresses to date.

There have been times when she’s had five different jobs on the go at any one time, but she landed her first job in publishing by offering to work for free and went on to build a career in editing, journalism and public relations, later achieving another dream by gaining her PhD in cross-cultural literature.

She is an internationally published author of four novels, several commissioned biographies and non-fiction books and lives in one of the friendliest suburbs she’s come across.

Erin brings the perfect mix of education and experience of trauma within the foster care system. Erin holds a bachelor’s degree in counseling. Her introduction to the world of foster care began during her studies when she was employed as a child and youth worker. Upon graduation, she accepted a full-time job at an agency focused on therapeutic foster care. Seeing firsthand the acute shortage of foster parents, and with a passion for working with foster kids, in 2011 Erin and her husband Joel became licensed therapeutic foster parents.

Over the years, twelve children ranging in age from one to fourteen years have been placed with them. They adopted their two oldest children from the foster care system in 2014 and continue to be licensed and open for placements.

She has extensive experience of marketing, relationship building, and sales training. She and a co-owner did business coaching that included one-on-one and group coaching and taught public speaking. Erin has run her own conferences, virtual retreats, and webinars, and spoke at Wedding MBA in Las Vegas.

Ian Chambers is an Academic Associate of Pembroke College, Cambridge and a Supervisor at Robinson College, Cambridge he gained his BA (Hons) and MA from the University of Warrick and then travelled across the Atlantic to complete his doctorate at the University of California. He has published in several academic journals including the American Indian Quarterly, Imago Mundi, and the Journal of Cherokee Studies. He has been the recipient of a Visiting Fellowship at the Institute for Southern Studies, Columbia, South Carolina, and a John R. Rockefeller Library Fellowship Colonial Williamsburg Virginia.