Ezra Jack Keats was an American writer and illustrator of children's books. He won the 1963 Caldecott Medal for illustrating The Snowy Day, which he also wrote. Many of Ezra’s stories are about a group of friends growing up in the city. The neighborhood they live in reflects the streets where Ezra grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

Born Jacob Ezra Katz, he was the third child of Polish-Jewish immigrants Benjamin Katz and Augusta Podgainy. Despite the family's financial struggles, Jack was artistically inclined from an early age, creating artwork from scraps of wood, cloth, and paper. His father, Benjamin Katz, worked as a waiter and discouraged his son's artistic ambitions, fearing a life of poverty.

Keats is best known for introducing multiculturalism into mainstream American children's literature. He was one of the first children's book authors to use an urban setting for his stories and developed the use of collage as a medium for illustration.

He expressed a belief in a world where no child should be an outsider. "If we could see each other exactly as the other is," he wrote, "this would be a different world."