Angela Flournoy is the author of critically-acclaimed novel The Turner House, which was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award and was a Summer 2015 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a May 2015 Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Sunday Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California. She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and Trinity Washington University.

Christopher Merrill's work has been translated into twenty-five language, his journalism appears in many publications, and his awards include a knighthood in arts and letters from the French government. He has held the William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, and now directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and has undertaken cultural diplomacy missions to more than forty countries for the United States Department of State. In April 2012 President Obama appointed Merrill to the National Council on the Humanities. He has published six collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water, and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Ales Debeljak's Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several edited volumes, among them, Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Natureand From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O'Keefe as Icon; and five books of nonfiction, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, and The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War.