Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago, Illinois on September 6, 1962. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and St. John's College, Cambridge. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep, and Manhattan Beach, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2018. Her title, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Her short stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, and Granta. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship. Her non-fiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine and have won a number of awards.
Heidi Pitlor is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor for The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays, The Daylight Marriage, and Impersonation.