Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities, and the nonfiction books The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between and The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry. She is a former Stegner Fellow in Fiction, the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, and the winner of an Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Boston Review, Bookforum, The New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. D’Erasmo is a Professor of Writing and Publishing Practices at Fordham University.

Michael Stipe is an artist, producer, and singer/songwriter. He fronted the band R.E.M. for 31 years, selling more than 100 million records and touring the world. As a film producer he made over 25 feature films, including Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich, Jim McKay’s En El Séptimo Día, Chris Smith’s American Movie, and Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine. For the past decade his personal focus has been cross-medium work, incorporating video, soundscape, sculpture, and photographic and digital imagery. Recent photobooks include Volume 1 (with Jonathan Berger, 2018), Our Interference Times: A Visual Record (with Douglas Coupland, 2019), a third volume of portraits (2021), and the current Even the Birds Gave Pause (2023), all released through Damiani out of Bologna, Italy. His first institution show was at ICA Milan in December 2023. He is currently recording his first solo album to be released early next year. Stipe is an ardent traveler based in New York City and Berlin.