Award-winning artist, illustrator, and author Tara Sweeney received a Minnesota State Arts Board grant to co-illustrate and author A to Zå?? with her son, Nate Christopherson. She is author of Close to Home: A Minnesota Year in Sketches, a collection of illustrated creative nonfiction. She is professor emeritus at Augsburg University, where she taught drawing and painting for twenty-five years.

Nate Christopherson is a special education teacher and freelance illustrator. He created art for Amy Leach’s Things That Are and a special edition of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. He received a Minnesota State Arts Board grant to illustrate The Island, an award-winning limited-edition collaborative artist book. Sweeney and Christopherson both live in St. Paul, Minnesota.