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Ha Jin immigrated in 1986 to the United States to earn a Ph.D. in English at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. Within four years, Jin had published his first book of poems in English, Between Silences. After receiving his degree, Jin began teaching at Emory University, Atlanta, and has continued to write and publish. He has won many awards including: three Pushcart Prizes for fiction, a prize from the Kenyon Review, an Agni Best Fiction Prize, a PEN Hemingway Award for first fiction for Ocean of Words, a Flannery O'Conner Award for Under the Red Flag, as well as a National Book Award, and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, both for Waiting.

Born in Shanghai, China, Anchee Min grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and has held jobs that span from growing cotton on the Red Fire Communal Farm, near the East China Sea, to an actress in the Shanghai Film Studio, to waitress, to writer. Min is probably best known for her memoir Red Azalea, which was named 1994's Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in 1993. Her latest book, Empress Orchid: A Novel, is the story of Orchid, the last empress of China. Other books by Min include Becoming Madame Mao, Wild Ginger and Katherine.