Barry Gifford is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and librettist best known for the novel Wild at Heart, which was adapted into an award-winning film by David Lynch, and for cowriting the screenplay for Lynch's film Lost Highway. Published in twenty-eight languages, he has been the recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, and the Writers Guild of America. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Lawrence Lee (d. 1990) was a Peabody Award-winning journalist who cowrote the acclaimed biography Saroyan with Gifford.