Derek Mong is the author of Other Romes (2011). From 2008 to 2010 he held the Axton Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Louisville, and he has previously been the Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. His poetry, translations, and prose have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Cream City Review, Court Green, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his wife in San Francisco; together they are translating the Russian poems of Maxim Amelin. He also holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where he received two Hopwood Awards.

Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won five Hopwood awards for the essay, drama, and fiction. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 2008 to 2010, she was the 2010–11 Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, was an Essence Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Her second novel, Salvage the Bones, was published this August.