Nick Arvin's first novel, Articles of War, was named one of the best books of the year by Esquire, Detroit Free Press, Rocky Mountain News, and The Independent. It won the Rosenthal Foundation Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Boyd Award, and was selected for the One Book, One Denver reading program.

His second novel, The Reconstructionist, was described as "thrilling and soulful" by David Wroblewski and was selected by Amazon as a Best Book of the Month. Arvin's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and numerous other periodicals. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He lives in Denver.

Christopher Buckley is a novelist, essayist, humorist, critic, magazine editor, and memoirist. His books include Thank You for Smoking, The Judge Hunter, Make Russia Great Again, and The Relic Master. He worked as a merchant seaman and White House speechwriter. He has written for many newspapers and magazines and has lectured in over seventy cities around the world. He was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence.

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He published his first collection of poems, New Weather, in 1973. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Horse Latitudes (2006).

Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. From 1999 to 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.