Author Daniel Pinchbeck has deep personal roots in the New York counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. His father was an abstract painter, and his mother, Joyce Johnson, was a member of the Beat Generation and dated Jack Kerouac as On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957 (chronicled in Johnsons bestselling book, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir). Pinchbeck was a founder of the 1990s literary magazine Open City with fellow writers Thomas Beller and Robert Bingham. He has written for many publications, including Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. In 1994, he was chosen by The New York Times Magazine as one of Thirty Under Thirty destined to change our culture. Pinchbeck lives in New Yorks East Village, where he is editorial director of Reality Sandwich (www.realitysandwich.com). He writes a column, Prophet Motive, for Conscious Enlightment publishing (www.cemagazines.com), which appears in Conscious Choice (Chicago), Conscious Choice (Seattle), Whole Life Times (LA), and Common Ground (SF)."

Maxine Swann (born February 11, 1969) is an American fiction author. Swann grew up on a farm in southern Pennsylvania, before attending Phillips Academy and then Columbia College, where she studied under Mary Gordon. She pursued her graduate studies at the Sorbonne, Université de Paris VII, earning her master's degree in 1997 with a thesis on the style of Marcel Proust. She now lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has won the O. Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize. She is a Founding Editor of the bilingual literary magazine "The Buenos Aires Review." She has taught creative writing at Barnard College and also works as a private writing coach.