Geraldine Brooks is an award-winning author and journalist. Brooks covered environmental issues as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, and at The Wall Street Journal she focused on crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 2006 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, and in that same year she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Brooks’ most recent novel, Caleb’s Crossing, was a New York Times best seller. Other novels, Year of Wonders and People of the Book, are international bestsellers, translated into more than 25 languages. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence.

Carla Kaplan is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University and the author of several books, including The Erotics of Talk: Women's Writing and Feminist Paradigms, Miss Anne in Harlem, and the highly acclaimed Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, the first published collection of a major African American woman's letters- which made Kaplan a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. Kaplan has received numerous academic honors, including the Robert D. Klein Award, the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Wellesley College, fellowships from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Culture among others. She is an occasional contributor to The Los Angeles Times and The Nation, and lectures widely on literature and culture.