Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940) is the author of many works of memoir, fiction, poetry, and essays. She has been the recipient of the National Book Award (for China Men), the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (for The Woman Warrior), the PEN West Award for Fiction (for Tripmaster Monkey), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a National Humanities Medal, and the National Medal of Arts. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.

Viet Thanh Nguyen (b. 1971), editor, is the author of the novel The Sympathizer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books include, most recently, the story collection The Refugees, as well as Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and many other awards, he is currently the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He was a student of Kingston's at the University of California, Berkeley.