Joanne Skerrett was born and brought up in Dominica. She moved with her family to the United States during the 1980s. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a BA in English and later attended Northeastern University where she earned an MBA. She also holds a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a journalist on newspapers including the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune. Joanne lives in Washington DC where she works as a lawyer. Abraham’s Treasure is her fifth novel and her first book for young people.

---

Kathy MacLean was born in Dominica and lives in London. She was head of the Ethnic Minority Achievement (EMA) Service in Wandsworth’s Children’s Services, south London, for many years and is now a consultant for literacy and the Creative Curriculum. Karen Mears is also an experienced EMA advisor and has worked in multicultural arts education and at the Horniman Museum, London. She was involved in a project linking London and Dominican schools. Kathy and Karen brought their educational expertise to the compilation of the pack, in particular regarding the questions, activities and research of the illustrated cards. Polly Pattullo, the publisher of Papillote Press, did much of the research about Hillsborough that appears in the teachers’ booklet.

---

Pupils from Year 6 (the top year of primary level) of Atkinson school, Dominica,  wrote the words for The Snake King of the Kalinago supported by their teacher Micheline Bruno and the school principal,Alice Laronde. The project was co-ordinated by educational psychologist Jamie Sorhaindo and workshop support was provided by literacy specalist Chris Lawrence (www.show-me-wow.com). The illustrations were produced in the early 1990s in a workshop by a  Carib Territory youth group.

---

Elma Napier (1892-1973) wrote Black and White Sands in the 1960s in Dominica. By then she had written two novels, Duet in Discord and A Flying Fish Whispered, both published before the second world war, and two memoirs, Youth is a Blunder and Winter is in July. Elma Napier was born in Scotland, the daughter of Sir Wiliam Gordon Cumming, who, famously, was accused of cheating while playing cards with the Prince of Wales. She settled in Dominica in 1932 with her husband and two young children and built a home, known as Pointe Baptiste, on the then remote north coast of the island. She later became the first woman to sit in a Caribbean parliament and first served in Dominica's Legislative Assembly in 1947. She died in Dominica in 1973.

---

Celia Sorhaindo is the co-compiler of Home Again. She was born in Dominica and left with her family for England in 1976. She returned to Dominica in 2005 and is currently a freelance photographer and writer.

---

Christborne Shillingford, author of Most Wanted, was born in Grand Bay, Dominica, on December 25 1959 - hence his name. He was educated at the Dominica Grammar School and lives on his family's Carholme estate, which overlooks a lake recently created by a landslide. Shillingford calls the area "Miracle Valley". Most Wanted is his first book.

---

Yet We Survive developed from an idea by Irvince Auguiste (right with his wife, Louisette), a former Kalinago chief, to hold a creative workshop for a group of young Kalinago people from the Carib Territory. Mary Walters (below right), who ran the workshop, is the editor of Yet We Survive. A Scottish teacher and a specialist in community arts projects, she first went to Dominica in 1986 to work on an international children's project for the Commonwealth Arts Festival. Mary later curated the words and pictures developed in the workshop as a touring exhibition for Scotland's international photographic festival "Fotofeis". She also produced and edited the first edition of this book.

---

Phyllis Shand Allfrey (1908-1986), author of It Falls Into Place, was born in Dominica, into a once wealthy planter family -- like her compatriot and sometime friend Jean Rhys -- and became a significant politician as well as a literary figure. As a young woman she lived for a time in the United States, moving in well-connected New York society, and later spent some years in Britain, where she joined the Fabian Society and the Socialist League. Returning to the West Indies in the 1950s, she co-founded the Dominica Labour Party and became a minister in the cabinet of the short-lived Federation of the West Indies in Trinidad. Back in Dominica, she ran a newspaper -- The Dominica Star -- and lived until her death in a tiny stone house filled with books and memories, of both the triumphs and the disappointments that characterised her personal and political life. Her acclaimed novel, The Orchid House, was first published in 1953, re-issued thirty years later by Virago and filmed for Channel 4 television in 1991.