Richard Gray is Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex. His books include The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (which won the C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature), American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography, Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism, and A History of American Literature. He is also editor of a number of collections and anthologies, and a regular reviewer for various newspapers and journals, including the Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review. He is the first specialist in American literature to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Owen Robinson is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Essex. He is the author of several articles on the novels of William Faulkner, and is editing A Routledge Guide to Light in August. He is currently working on writing centred on New Orleans, and on reader-writer relations in African American literature.