Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty books, about a wide range of things, from the first woman president of the United States to what barnyard animals are thinking. His first book, About Three Bricks Shy...And the Load Filled Up, was named one of the ten best sports books ever by The Washington Post. His most recent book, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South, won the 2007 nonfiction award from the New England Independent Booksellers Association. A contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Blount also writes a regular column ("Gone Off Up North") for The Oxford American, and has done so in the past for Esquire, The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveller, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Atlanta Journal. His essays, articles, stories, verses and even drawings have appeared in 166 different periodicals. Blount Jr. has also tried his hand as a playwright, song writer, script writer, and television/radio personality. He is a panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me, and has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, the CBS Morning Show, Tonight Show, David Letterman Show, Good Morning America, Today Show, Larry King, and Politically Incorrect.

Rick Wartzman is director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a columnist for BusinessWeek magazine. Previously, he spent two decades as a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. He is the co-author, with Mark Arax, of The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire. A bestseller, it won, among other honors, a California Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.