Catherine Gilbert Murdock was born in Charleston, South Carolina and grew up on a small farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. She attended Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania. She writes young adult books including Princess Ben, Dairy Queen, The Off Season, and Front and Center.Joan Wylie Hall, Oxford, Mississippi, is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of "Shirley Jackson: Studies in Short Fiction" and the editor of "Conversations with Audre Lorde" (University Press of Mississippi). Her work has also been published in numerous journals such as "Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers"; "Southern Register"; "Mississippi… Quarterly"; "Faulkner Journal"; and the "Eudora Welty Review".She was born & grew up in Durban, South Africa, where three of her previous novel,s Home Ground, The Bungalow & The Mirror are set. Her stories & essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Story, The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly. She lives in Sonoma, California.