David C. Smith was born August 10, 1952, in Youngstown, Ohio. He is a freelance medical editor and the author of 29 novels, numerous short stories and articles, and the award-winning Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography. He lives in Palatine, Illinois, with his wife, Janine, and their daughter, Lily.

Richard L. Tierney (August 7, 1936-February 1, 2022) was an author, poet, and scholar in the fields of heroic fantasy and modern fantastic fiction. His stories of Simon of Gitta (The Scroll of Thoth and the novels The Gardens of Lucellus, with Glen Rahman, and The Drums of Chaos) enlarged the genre of sword-and-sorcery fiction, while his acclaimed essay "The Derleth Mythos" (1972) served as a corrective to early misinterpretation of H.P. Lovecraft's philosophical cosmicism. His volume Collected Poems was published by Arkham House in 1981. While working as a foresterin the U.S. Forestry Service (1958-1971), Tierney studied Mesoamerican archaeology, particularly in the Yucatan, learned Spanish, and researched the Nahuatl culture and language, of which he made use in his fiction. He was awarded the Minnesota Fantasy Award in 1993 and in 2010 was nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association Grand Master award.