Areej Gamal is an Egyptian writer, translator, and film critic. Mariam, It's Arwa won the Sawiris Cultural Award for Young Writers in 2021. She has published three collections of short stories and won first prize in the Goethe Institute Cairo's short story competition. This prize-winning story was translated into German and another of her stories was published in English translation in An Alternative Guide to Getting Lost. Mariam, It's Arwa is her first novel and her first book to be translated into English.

Addie Leak is an editor and literary translator from French, Arabic, and Spanish. Her work has appeared in such outlets as Words Without Borders, The Common, The Huffington Post, and The Georgia Review. She has also translated A Mask the Color of the Sky by Bassem Khandaqji. She received her MFA from University of Iowa in literary translation, was a Fulbright scholar, and currently lives in Amman, Jordan.