Jo Ann Callis began teaching at CalArts in 1976. Her work has been widely exhibited in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art, all in Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Gallery Min, Tokyo. In 2009 a retrospective of her work, Woman Twirling, was presented by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Callis has received three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards and prizes.

Francine Prose is the author of twenty works of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book is Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. She lives in New York City.