Jane O'Connor: My name is Jane O'Connor. I was a fanatic reader of biographies myself as a child. I very much liked the idea of having sidebar information in the biographies, because young readers have so little historical context. If you're talking about Anne Frank, they don't know about Hitler and World War II, and why the Franks would have had to go into hiding in Amsterdam. And rather than having a lot of history right in the narrative, we used the sidebars to flesh out the world of the person that is the subject of the biographies.

I love working on the series, and what's so gratifying is just the reach of the series, and how kids do collect them almost in the same way they would baseball cards. They have a very strong narrative. They're easy to read, and I think this is what's made them popular and valuable for kids.