Kathleen Ford was born in New Jersey and educated in Catholic schools before attending Columbia University. "Jeffrey County", a novel set in rural Virginia, was published by St. Martin’s Press, but Kathleen’s first love is for short stories. She’s published over 35 stories in commercial magazines such as Redbook and Ladies Home Journal, and in quarterlies such as Southern Review, North American Review, Antioch Review and Sewanee Review. A story entitled “Man on the Run", which was first published in The New England Review, was reprinted in THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2012. Two of her stories have won PEN Syndicated Fiction prizes and in 2011 she was awarded a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship.

Kathleen lives in Charlottesville, Virginia where she teaches adult ESOL. She continues to write stories about Irish immigrant maids, the soldiers of World War I, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Jesse Goolsby is an Air Force officer and the author of Acceleration Hours (University of Nevada Press) and I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), winner of the Florida Book Award for Fiction and long-listed for the Flaherty-Duncan First Novel Prize. His fiction and essays have appeared widely, including The Literary Review, EPOCH, The Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Salon, and Pleiades. He is the recipient of the Richard Bausch Short Story Prize, the John Gardner Memorial Award in Fiction, and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences. His work has been listed as notable in both Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories, and selected for Best American Mystery Stories. He serves as Acquisitions Editor for the literary journal War, Literature & the Arts. Goolsby holds an English degree from the United States Air Force Academy, a Masters degree in English from the University of Tennessee, and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University. For news, events, and reviews, visit his official author site at jessegoolsby.com.

Otto Penzler is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop (www.mysteriousbookshop.com) in New York City and is regarded as the world's foremost authority on crime, mystery and suspense fiction. He founded The Mysterious Press in 1975, which he later sold to Warner Books (1989). He reacquired the imprint in 2010 and it now publishes original books as an imprint at Grove/Atlantic, and both original works and classic crime fiction through MysteriousPress.com (www.mysteriouspress.com), in partnership with Open Road Integrated Media.

Penzler is a prolific editor, and has won two Edgar Awards, for Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection in 1977 and The Lineup in 2010. The Mystery Writers of America awarded him the prestigious Ellery Queen Award in 1994 and the Raven--the group's highest non-writing award--in 2003.