Joan Chase was born and raised in Ohio. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in philosophy and history and later enrolled in the Writing Workshop of the University of Vermont. After being turned down by several publishers, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia was released by Harper & Row in 1983 and went on to win numerous prizes, including the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction by an American writer. Chase is also the author of The Evening Wolves (1990) and the story collection Bonneville Blue (1991). Ms. Chase died in 2018.

Luke Salisbury was a Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and taught English and Film. He is the author of The Answer Is Baseball (1989) and a novel, The Cleveland Indian (1992), nominated for the Casey Award in 1992 as best baseball book of the year. Mr. Salisbury contributed to Red Sox Century: One Hundred Years of Red Sox Baseball, Baseball & The Game of Life, Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures, DiMaggio: An Illustrated Life, Jackie Robinson: Between the Baselines, and Fall Classics: The Best Writing About The World Series’ First Hundred Years. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Ploughshares, Stories Magazine, Pulpsmith, Fan, Elysian Fields, Spitball, Nine, SABR Review of Books, and Cooperstown Review. He is a past vice president and national secretary of the Society For American Baseball Research (SABR).

Gilmore Tamny lives in Somerville, MA, where she likes to write proverbs, melodramas, novels, poems and songs (the latter for the band Weather Weapon) and also has been busy with a series of drawings using both the left and right hand. She listens to an inordinate amount of audiobooks. (It's true, she does. - Ed.)