Massa Makan Diabaté (1938–1988) was a Malian author and griot. His trilogy of novels—Le lieutenant de Kouta, Le coiffeur de Kouta, and Le boucher de Kouta—won the 1987 Grand prix international de la Fondation Léopold Sédar Senghor.
Shane Auerbach is a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a visiting instructor at Carleton College. His research focuses on microeconomic theory and industrial organization.
David Yost received his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His short stories have appeared in more than thirty magazines, including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and The Sun, and he is an editor of the anthology Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy.