David Shields is the author of ten previous books, including Reality Hunger; The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, a New York Times bestseller; Black Planet, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington.

Bradford Morrow is the author of the novels Come Sunday, The Almanac Branch, Trinity Fields, Giovanni’s Gift, Ariel’s Crossing, and The Diviner’s Tale. His first collection of short stories, Lush and Other Stories, is forthcoming in the fall of 2011 from Pegasus Books. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the founding editor of the widely acclaimed literary journal Conjunctions, for which he received the 2007 PEN/Nora Magid Award, and is a professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College. He divides his time between New York City and an old farmhouse in upstate New York.