Mona Simpson worked as a journalist before attending graduate school where she published her first short stores in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and Mademoiselle. While in New York, she worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road. Her work has been awarded several prizes: A Whiting Prize, a Guggenheim, an NEA grant, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.

Michelle Huneven is the author of three novels --Blame, Jamesland and Round Rock, all of which have been nominated for an LA Times Book Award. Her nonfiction writings include restaurant reviews for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, other food journalism and, with Bernadette Murphy, the Tao Gals Guide to Real Estate. She has received a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers and a Whiting Writers' Award for fiction. Michelle currently teaches creative writing at UCLA.