Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is a novelist, poet, farmer, and environmental writer and activist. He earned an MA in English at the University of Kentucky in 1957 and in 1958 joined Stanford University's creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, studying under Stegner and with Edward Abbey, Larry McMurtry, Ernest Gaines, Tillie Olsen, Robert Stone, and Ken Kesey. In 1961 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to spend a year in Tuscany. From 1962-64 he taught English at NYU before returning to the University of Kentucky, where he taught creative writing from 1964 until 1977 and then again from 1987 to 1993. He has published over 50 books, including over 25 books of poetry, 16 essay collections, and 8 novels. In 2010 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, and in 2013 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. He has made his home with his wife, Tanya Berry, in Henry County, Kentucky, for the last 50 years.

Jack Shoemaker is the former Editorial Director of Counterpoint Press, publishing the work of Gary Snyder, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan Connell, Robert Aitken, Anne Lamott, Jane Vandenburgh, and many others. He has worked with Wendell Berry for more than forty years.