Marc Aronson is the acclaimed author of Trapped: How the World Rescued 33 Miners from 2,000 Feet Below the Chilean Desert, which earned four starred reviews.

He is also the author of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Quest for El Dorado, winner of the ALA's first Robert L. Sibert Award for nonfiction and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award.

He has won the LMP award for editing and has a PhD in American history from NYU.

Marc lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with his wife and son. 

Amy Jordan lives by the sea with her husband and young children in Cork, Ireland.

A former tutor at Munster Technological University, she worked in the Irish civil service for a number of years before pursuing her passion for writing crime fiction. Amy is a fan of thrillers and crime novels, and her love of suspense and plot twists flows into her writing.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and three memoirs. His many honours include the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.

Naomi Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents. She studied fiction at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she was awarded the Maytag Fellowship for Excellence in Fiction to complete her first novel, "The Star Side of Bird Hill."

Jackson traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an MA in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, Jackson has had her work appear in literary journals and magazines in the United States and abroad.