Pico Iyer is the author of six works of nonfiction and two novels, including The Open Road: The Global Journey of the XIVth Dalai Lama. He has covered the Tibetan question for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications for more than twenty years. He lives in suburban Japan.

Thomas Curwen is an editor-at-large for the Los Angeles Times. He has worked as the editor of the Times' Outdoors section, and from 1996 to 2002, he was the deputy editor of the Book Review. His work as a feature writer has been honored by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors, and in 2002 he was a recipient of a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, and has a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Southern California, where he was honored by the Academy of American Poets.