MELANIE RAE THON is the author of two collections of lyric fictions, The Bodies of Birds and Silence & Song; the novels The Voice of the River, Sweet Hearts, Iona Moon, and Meteors in August; and the story collections In This Light: New and Selected Stories, First, Body-for which she won the Whiting Award for Fiction in 1997-and Girls in the Grass. Thon's work has been included in two editions of The Best American Short Stories, three Pushcart Prize anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hopwood Award, and a Writer's Residency from the Lannan Foundation. Originally from Montana, Thon lives in Salt Lake City, where she is professor emeritus at the University of Utah.

STACEY D'ERASMO is the author of five novels and two books of nonfiction. Her novel The Complicities was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is frequently a faculty member at the Breadloaf Writers Conference and was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University; received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2009; and was the 2010-11 Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.