Kaveh Bassiri was born in Iran and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in his early teens. He has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where he was also the Editor of 2006 issue of Lumina, Sarah Lawrence's graduate literary journal. In a previous life, he was a chief technology strategist and wrote programming and software architecture books.

Mary Austin Speaker received her MFA from Indiana University in 2006, where she was Poetry Editor of the Indiana Review and taught creative writing. Her work recently received the Vera Meyer Strube prize from the Academy of American Poets, and appears in recent issues of 9th Letter, Diner, Bat City Review, Spork magazine and others. She works as a book designer and illustrator and lives in Brooklyn.