Jean Stafford (1915-1979) grew up in southern California and Colorado. After graduating from the University of Colorado in 1936, she studied in Heidelberg for a year, then moved to the Northeast and began to write. Stafford would publish three novels, Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1947), The Catherine Wheel (1952), more than forty short stories (The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970), and A Mother in History (1966), a journalistic portrait of Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Kathryn Davis is the Hurst Writer in Residence at Washington University and the author of eight novels, including Labrador, The Walking Tour, Duplex, and The Silk Road. She has received the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.