Edna Ferber was born in 1885 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. After a short career in journalism, she turned to writing novels, short stories, and plays. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for her novel,
So Big, and subsequent works went on to become best-sellers.
Giant, which she published in 1952, became the basis of the hit film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. She died in 1968 at the age of 82.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection, Where Are the Snows, winner of the X. J. Kennedy Prize, was released by Texas Review Press in September 2022, and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in the fall of 2023.