Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was born and raised in New Zealand. She moved to England at nineteen and spent much of her life thereafter in London, where she became a prominent modernist author and moved in the same circles as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group. She published three collections of short stories in her lifetime, including Bliss and The Garden Party. After she died of tuberculosis at age thirty-four, her husband published two additional volumes of her short fiction as well as posthumous collections of her poetry, letters, and journals.

Sloane Crosley is the author of the memoir Grief Is for People, the novels Cult Classic and The Clasp, and the essay collections Look Alive Out There, How Did You Get This Number, and I Was Told There'd Be Cake. She lives in New York City.