David Black is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producer. His novel Like Father was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and listed as one of the seven best novels of the year by the Washington Post. The King of Fifth Avenue was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the A.P. Among the television shows he has produced and written are the Sidney Lumet series 100 Centre Street, which was listed as one of the 10 best shows of the year, the Richard Dreyfuss series The Education of Max Bickford, Monk, CSI-Miami, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, and Law & Order, which received an Emmy nomination for Best Dramatic Show and a Golden Globe nomination. He won the Writers’ Guild of America Award for The Confession. He was also nominated for the Writers’ Guild of America Award for an episode of Hill Street Blues. He received an American Bar Association Certificate of Merit for Nullification, a controversial episode of Law & Order about Militia groups, which the Los Angeles Times called an example of “the new Golden Age of television.”  Among his other awards, he has received a National Endowment of the Arts grant in fiction, Playboy’s Best Article of the Year Award, Best Essays of the Year 1986 Honorable Mention, Forward’s Book of the Year Special Mention, and an Atlantic Monthly “First” award for fiction. He has also received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for The Plague Years, a book based on a two-part series that he wrote for Rolling Stone and that won a National Magazine Award in Reporting and the National Science Writers Award. He has taught writing at Lehman College, Mt. Holyoke College, and Harvard, where he is a scholar-in-residence at Kirkland House. He is also a former board member of the Mystery Writers of America and a member of the Century Association, the Williams Club, the Columbia Club, PEN, the Explorers’ Club, and the Players.

Quincy Troupe, born in St. Louis, Missouri, is the author of 18 books and ten volumes of poetry. His newest book of poems, Errançities (Coffee House Press 2012) will be published in February 2012. His book of poems, The Architecture of Language (Coffee House Press, 2006), earned Troupe the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement. He also received the 2003 Milt Kessler Poetry Award for Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2002), selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best books of poetry published in 2002.

Quincy Troupe is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and was the first official Poet Laureate of the State of California. He has been awarded three American Book Awards: for Snake-Back Solos, poems, 1980; for Miles: The Autobiography, Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, 1990; and a 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award for Sustained Literary Excellence. He is also the author of a memoir, Miles and Me (The University of California Press, 2000); the co-author of The Pursuit of Happyness, with Chris Gardner (Harper Collins, 2006); and the editor of James Baldwin: The Legacy (Simon & Shuster, 1989). Troupe received a 1991 Peabody Award for co-producing and writing the Miles Davis Radio Project that aired on NPR. A movie on Miles Davis based on his memoir Miles and Me, for which Troupe has written a  screenplay, is scheduled for release in fall 2012. In winter 2013, Disney Hyperion will publish Troupe’s third book for children, Hallelujah: The Story of Ray Charles, illustrated by Brian Pinkney.  Currently, Troupe is the editor of Black Renaissance Noire, published at The Institute of African-American Affairs at New York University. He lives in Harlem with his wife, Margaret Porter.