Hood, Charles: - Charles Hood teaches English in the Mojave Desert and is a Research Fellow at the Center for Art and Environment in Reno. His honors include a National Endowment of the Humanities award, a Fulbright in Ethnopoetics, and artist-in- residencies with the Annenberg Center in Santa Monica, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Playa Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. His book about Antarctica, South x South, won the Hollis Summers prize from Ohio University Press. MOUTH (JEF Books, 2017) is his tenth book. He has been a dishwasher, a factory worker, and a nature guide in Africa. In a brief and intense descent into the addiction of birding, Hood reached 5,000 species on his world list before he took the cure and stopped counting. Current book projects include a people's guide to architecture of Los Angeles, a survey of urban nature, poetry about all the moons of the Solar System, and a field guide to mammals.

Mugnolo, Christine: - Painter and printmaker Christine Mugnolo is a doctoral candidate in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. Her previous art degrees are from Princeton, the University of Connecticut, Indiana University, and the Courtauld Institute, London. The plates for MOUTH (JEF Books, 2017) come from a series of pastel self-portraits based on recovery from surgery; they were the initial inspiration for this story. Christine Mugnolo's art explores relationships and the ever-fascinating rituals of human behavior, from nerds to toddlers to the strange schools of people swimming past the viewing portals of an aquarium. At present she is working on a large, multi-panel watercolor map tracing the flow of water in California. MOUTH is her third published book.