Michael Crichton was born in Chicago in 1942. He was educated at Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School and in 1969 was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. His novels include Rising Sun, Jurassic Park, Congo, The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery,  and Eaters of the Dead. He is the author of four works of nonfiction: Five Patients, Jasper Johns, Electronic Life and Travels. Among the films he has directed are Westworld, Coma and the movie version of his own The Great Train Robbery. In 1988 he was Visiting Writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

John Grisham, formerly a criminal defense attorney, is a graduate of Mississippi State University and Ole Miss Law School, and has also served two terms in the Mississippi House of Representatives. Also the author of A Time To Kill, he lives with his wife and two children on a farm near Oxford where he is at work on a new novel.

Wally Lamb’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Pushcart Prize XV: Best of the Small Presses; The Best of the Missouri Review; Streetsongs 1; New Voices in Fiction; Northeast magazine; and  The New York Times Magazine. He is the recipient of an NEA grant for fiction, and is a Missouri Review William Penden fiction prize winner. A nationally honored teacher of writing, Lamb lives in Connecticut with his wife and their three children. He is currently at work on his second novel.

Arthur Golden was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and was educated at Harvard College where he received a degree in art history, specializing in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned an MA in Japanese history from Columbia University, where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. Following a summer at Beijing University, he worked in Tokyo, and, after returning to the United States, earned an MA in English from Boston University. He resides in Brookline Massachusetts, with his wife and two children