About the Authors

Kevin Ryan, activist and child advocate, is president and CEO of Covenant House, one of the largest charities in the Americas. Covenant House helps more than 56,000 homeless and trafficked children and teenagers annually. The charity's international human rights work has been awarded the Conrad Hilton Humanitarian Award, the Olaf Palme Peace Prize, the United States Department of State Hero Citation, and, earlier this year, the Guatemala Hands of Peace Award. During the 1990s, Ryan spent nearly a decade on the frontlines of Covenant House's work with homeless and trafficked children. He was appointed by the governor of New Jersey as the state's first child advocate and founded a public watchdog agency monitoring conditions for children at risk of abuse and neglect. He also led a reform of the state's foster care system. His work received national attention, including two appearances on "60 Minutes," front-page stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is a graduate of Catholic University, Georgetown Law Center and NYU Law School. Kevin Ryan became the fourth international president of Covenant House in 2009. Tina Kelley is a former New York Times reporter and worked with the team that won a Pulitzer Prize in public service for the paper's coverage of the September 11 attacks. She wrote 121 "Portraits of Grief," brief profiles of the victims, which appeared in the book Portraits 9/11/2001. Her first book of non-fiction, about homeless youth and how to keep young people off the streets, co-authored with Kevin M. Ryan, is due out in September from Wiley. Her first book of poetry, The Gospel of Galore, won a 2003 Washington State Book Award and her second poetry collection, Precise, is appearing in 2012 from Word Press in Cincinnati. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, among other publications. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children.