Stephen Cooper is the editor of John Fante's "The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959". He is Professor of English & Film at California State University at Long Beach. He lives in Los Angeles, with his wife & their two children.Computer science professor, Randy Pausch, was born on October 23, 1960. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988. He was a member of the computer science faculty at the University of Virginia from 1988 to 1997 and spent a 1995 sabbatical working at Walt Disney Imagineering's Virtual Reality Studio before joining the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University. He… was the co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center and created the innovative educational software tool known as Alice that enables novices to create 3-D computer animations using a drag-and-drop interface. In September 2007, he gave a lecture entitled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, which was videotaped, found success on the Internet, and lead to a best-selling book entitled The Last Lecture. He died due to complications from pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008.
Jeffrey Zaslow was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on October 6, 1958. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon in 1980, he worked for The Orlando Sentinel's Sunday magazine until 1983 and then joined The Wall Street Journal as a feature writer. In 1987, he entered a contest held by The Chicago Sun-Times to fill the job left vacant when its advice columnist, Ann Landers, left to work for The Chicago Tribune. He won the contest and wrote the advice column All That Zazz until 2001. His first book, Tell Me All about It, was based on his years as an advice columnist. In 2001, he returned to The Wall Street Journal as a columnist and wrote a regular column called Moving On. His other books… include The Last Lecture written with Randy Pausch, Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope written with Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly, Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters written with Chesley B. Sullenberger, The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship, and The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters. He died in a car accident on February 10, 2012 at the age of 53.