David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Salon, A Public Space, Believer, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

James Franco’s film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance.

Matthew Vollmer is the author of Future Missionaries of America (published by MacAdam Cage and Salt Modern Fiction), a collection of stories, and inscriptions for headstones, a collection of essays. With David Shields, he is the co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (forthcoming from W. W. Norton). To read samples from this work, and to browse a collection of fraudulent artifacts, visit literaryartifacts.tumblr.com.

His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, New England Review, Epoch, Normal School, Glimmer Train, Tin House, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Ecotone, Antioch Review, Portland Review, Confrontation, Oxford American, Salt Hill, Fugue, Unstuck, Tampa Review, The Collagist, PANK, Barrelhouse, PRISM International, Carolina Quarterly, elimae, DIAGRAM, and New Letters. In 2010, Vollmer was awarded National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Vollmer earned an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. As an Assistant Professor, he is a member of the MFA Faculty in the English Department at Virginia Tech, where he directs the undergraduate creative writing program.

He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, with his wife, Kelly Pender, their son Elijah, and their dog Ruby.

Mieke Eerkens teaches creative writing online for UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program and is a visiting instructor for the Iowa Summer Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Creative Nonfiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among others, as well as the anthologies Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts; The Book of Uncommon Prayer; Best Travel Writing 2011; and Water's Edge: Open to Interpretation. She earned a B.A. from San Francisco State University where she was the editor-in-chief of the lit journal, Transfer, an M.A. in English from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She divides her time between Amsterdam and California.