C. Taylor-Butler (Christine Taylor-Butler), an MIT trained Civil Engineer, is the author of more than 70 books for children, including Sacred Mountain: Everest. She has won the Best Children’s Book of the Year Award and a host of other awards. Her short stories and essays have appeared in magazines and journals including the Horn Book Review, and Scholastic’s Read and Rise Literacy Guide for Parents, to name a few. In addition to her writing activities, she chairs MIT’s Regional Educational Council and serves on the Missouri Judicial Performance Committee. When not conducting various science experiments for many of her books: how to make solid objects float when they shouldn’t, creating invisible force fields with magnets, and making electricity from fruits and vegetables (bringing the love of science to classrooms everywhere), the author has traveled to remote places, such as the Tongas National Forest in Alaska, to scout unusual locations for her debut science fiction/adventure novel, The Lost Tribes. She lives in Missouri where she is responsible for the care and feeding of a spouse, college kids, cats, fish and a very needy 104-year-old historic house.