Robert Polito is the author of Hollywood & God; A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover; and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. Formerly the founding director of the graduate writing program at the New School, he is the president of the Poetry Foundation.

Greil Marcus is the author of Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces, The Dustbin of History, The Shape of Things to Come, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, The Doors, and, most recently, The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs. With Sean Wilentz he is the editor of The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad, and with Werner Sollors of A New Literary History of America. In recent years he has taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the New School in New York. His column "Real Life Rock Top 10" appears monthly in the Believer.