Nuriddeen Knight began her Islamic studies attending various Islamic lectures in the United States and later moved to Jordan to further her studies. She studied classical Arabic, marriage law, Islamic belief system (ᶜaqida), Prophetic biography (sīra), Qurᶜanic explanation (tafsīr), Prophetic speech and character, and Islamic spirituality (taṣawwuf) with Shaykh Khalīl Abdur-Rashid, Imam Amin Muhammad, Umm al-Khayr, Umm Sahl and Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller. In 2015 she created Noor Al Shadhili (nooralshadhili.com), a holistic initiative named after one of the greatest scholars in Islamic spirituality (taṣawwuf). It focuses on human development through education, research, and counseling. Her written work has been featured in various online publications like thepublicdiscourse.com and sapelosquare.com. She's given several lectures on topics related to Islam, mental health, and women's issues for women’s organizations like HAWA in Detroit, Michigan and Being-ME in Toronto, Canada as well as universities including University of Missouri and Queens College. She graduated from Columbia University with a Master’s Degree in Psychology and currently runs a blog (bythefigandtheolive.com) where you can read her social commentary. She is the author of Our Mother 'Aisha: A 40 Ḥadīth Collection and is working on a collection of forthcoming essays. For bookings and upcoming events visit nuriddeenknight.com. To find out more about this book, visit 40hadithofaisha.com.

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award. Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.

Sheila Jeffreys writes and teaches in the areas of sexual politics, international gender politics, and lesbian and gay politics. She has written six books on the history and politics of sexuality. Originally from the UK, Sheila moved to Melbourne in 1991 to take up a position at the University of Melbourne. She has been actively involved in feminist and lesbian feminist politics, particularly around the issue of sexual violence, since 1973. She is involved with the international non-government organization, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, in international organising. She is the author of The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930 (1985/1997) Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (1990), The Lesbian Heresy: A Feminist Perspective on the Lesbian Sexual Revolution (1993), The Idea of Prostitution (1997), Unpacking Queer Politics: a lesbian feminist perspective (2003) and Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (2005).