Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is a member of the Mojave and Pima Indian tribes. She attended Old Dominion University on a full athletic scholarship and, upon graduating, played professional basketball in Europe and Asia. After a career-ending knee injury, she returned to ODU and received her MFA in poetry and fiction in 2007.

Stephen Graham Jones has six novels, which include The Bird is Gone, Demon Theory, Ledfeather and one collection, Bleed Into Me with another novel and another collection coming soon. He's been an NEA Fellow, a Texas Writer's League Fellow, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction and the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.