TOD DAVIES lives with her husband, the filmmaker Alex Cox, and their two dogs, in the alpine valley of Colestin, Oregon, and at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of the cooking memoir Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got and Snotty Saves The Day, the first book in The History of Arcadia series. Unsurprisingly, her attitude toward literature is the same as her attitude toward cooking—it’s all about working with what you have to find new ways of looking at what you’ve got.

MIKE MADRID, a native San Franciscan, is the author of the Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and The History of Comic Book Heroines.