Pulitzer Prize winner and Guggenheim Fellow James Alan McPherson was born in Savannah, Georgia. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa. In a writing career that spans forty years, McPherson has been a contributor to many publications, including The Atlantic, Esquire, and Playboy, and was the editor of Double Take magazine. He is a professor of English at the University of Iowa. He died in 2016.

Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; he also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004. His first collection of stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short listed for the National Book Award. His second collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children, was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award. He has been an instructor of fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.