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Junius Edwards was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, He was educated at the University of Oslo in Norway The short story "Liars Don’t Qualify" has been anthologized in many books devoted to the writing of contemporary black authors. It won first prize in the Writer’s Digest Short Story Contest. In 1959 Edwards won a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship for Creative Writing. His short story "Mother Dear and Daddy," can be found in the anthology The Angry Black.

The son of a political activist, Martin Espada was born and reared in New York's impoverished East Side neighborhood. He grew up participating in demonstrations for social justice. After becoming a lawyer, he worked as a tenants’ rights advocate, but he also wrote and published poems in the tradition of Pablo Neruda and the poets of the Nuyorican scene. Espada’s work has won the Paterson Poetry Prize and the PEN/Revson Fellowship, the Gustavo Myers Outstanding Book Award, and the Independent Publisher Book Award, Currently, he teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he writes essays, edits anthologies, and continues to write poems.