Anne Fadiman is the author of The Wine Lover’s Daughter, a memoir about her father (2017). Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. Fadiman has also written two other essay collections, Ex Libris and At Large and At Small, and edited Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux). She is Professor in the Practice of English and Francis Writer in Residence at Yale.

Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, where he has written portraits of writers (Haruki Murakami, Anne Carson, John McPhee) and athletes (Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Bill Walton, Phil Jackson) and odd places all over the world, including Mount Rushmore and a Charles Dickens theme park. His work has won two National Magazine Awards and been included in multiple Best American Writing anthologies. Anderson is the author of the book Boom Town, a history of Oklahoma City — the most secretly interesting place on earth.