Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s first novel, Madeleine Is Sleeping, was nominated for a National Book Award. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tin House, The Georgia Review, and Best American Short Stories. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA fellowship, she lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at the University of California, San Diego.

Mikhail N. Epstein (Epshtein) was born in Moscow in 1950 but has lived in the United States since 1990, where he teaches at Emory University. He remains one of Russia's most respected philosophers and theorists, and the author of a range of quirky, highly individualistic, somewhat Borgesian projects--invented researches, disciplines, arts, neologisms on subjects as varied as “touch art,” new movements in Russian poetry, and "post-atheism." He works through what he calls "potentiation" that "both inherits the method of deconstruction and moves beyond it"-- towards a kind of constructive inventiveness. His latest project is “On the Future of the Humanities: Paradigmatic Shifts and Emerging Concepts”. Translations of Epstein’s 17 books and approximately 400 essays and articles can often be found in library catalogues under his Russian surname, Epshtein.