Born in Iran in 1946, Shahrnush Parsipur began her career as a fiction writer and producer at Iranian National Television and Radio. She was imprisoned for nearly five years by the Islamist government without being formally charged. Shortly after her release, she published Women Without Men and was arrested and jailed again, this time for her frank and defiant portrayal of women's sexuality. While still banned in Iran, the novel became an underground bestseller there and has been translated into many languages around the world. She is also the author of Touba and the Meaning of Night, among many other novels and short stories. Parsipur immigrated to the US in 1994 and lived in exile in Northern California until her death in 2026.

Sara Khalili is a financial journalist, editor, and translator of contemporary Iranian literature. Her published translations include As Red as Fire Tasting of Smoke, Selected Poems of Siavash Kasraii; Lucky those Half-Opened Buds, Selected Poems of Fereydoon Moshiri; several short stories in Strange Times My Dear: A PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature; and various short stories by Shahriar Mandanipour. Khalili won a 2007 PEN Translation Fund Grant for her translation from the Farsi of Seasons of Purgatory, a selection of short stories by Iranian writer Shahriar Mandanipour.