Amy Wilentz is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, Martyrs' Crossing, and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She frequently writes for The New Yorker and The Nation, and currently teaches in the Literary Journalism program at U.C. Irvine. Her most recent book is Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter Form Haiti.

Jon Wiener is a professor of history at the University of California Irvine, where he specializes in recent American history. He is the author of many books, including Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower, and Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files, among others. His most recent work is How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America. He is a contributing editor to The Nation magazine, and hosts an afternoon drive-time radio program on KPFK-90.7 FM featuring interviews on politics and culture.