Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of the novel The Portable Veblen; a collection, Stop That Girl, shortlisted for the Story Prize; and the novel MacGregor Tells the World, a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and School Library Journal best book of the year. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and has been recorded for NPR's Selected Shorts. She was an NEA/Japan-US Friendship Commission Fellow in 2010. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Stanford Continuing Studies program, and is currently senior editor of the Chicago Quarterly Review and managing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of Purity and four other novels, including Freedom and The Corrections, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including The Kraus Project and Farther Away. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.