Roz Chast was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 26, 1954. She received a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1977. Her cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker, Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, Redbook, and Mother Jones. She is the author of several books including The Party, After You Left: Collected Cartoons 1995-2003, What I Hate: From A to Z, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006, and Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir. She has also illustrated several books including The Alphabet from A to Y, with Bonus Letter, Z by Steve Martin.
David Remnick was born on October 29, 1958 in Hackensack, N.J. and educated at Princeton University. He began his career at the Washington Post in 1982. In 1992, he became a staff writer for the New Yorker. Remnick's book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction. The work deals with the last days of the Soviet Union, which Remnick witnessed firsthand as foreign correspondent to Moscow from the Washington Post. Remnick is the author of other works including The Devil Problem (And Other True Stories) published in 1996 and Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia in 1997. His most recent work, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and… the Rise of an American Hero, was published in 1998.