S. Sue McMillan was born in Jewell, Kansas, in 1929. Her father, an electrician, moved the family to Boulder, Colorado in the early 40s to take advantage of plentiful work prospects. Sue attended Boulder public schools and the University of Colorado. She spent four years with her husband, Claude, in Brazil in the late 50s, where three of her four children were born. Returning to the US, she completed a BA in Fine Arts at the University of Colorado in 1967. A prolific painter her entire life, she enjoyed some success in a number of local art galleries. In her 60s she took an interest in writing novels, meeting the real Yana by chance on a walk around a lake in Boulder. During subsequent walks, Yana related to Sue the story of this novel and agreed to allow Sue to write about it. Sue died in 2016 at the age of 86.

Paul Levitt grew up in a family that revered education and thought that the measure of a great society was not how often it pandered to special interests, but how well it treated the poor. Newark, New Jersey was his place of birth. Here the author received a public education in reading and writing that aimed at accomplishment, not self- esteem. He moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. At the University of Colorado, he received a BA in philosophy and an MA in history. After a year in Florence, Italy, he attended Washington University in St. Louis and then matriculated at UCLA for an MA and a PhD in English. He has taught at the University of Colorado since 1964, with a stint as a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His interests include travel, tennis, and swimming, but most of all the reading and writing of historical fiction, which has enabled him to visit the Jazz Age (Chin Music), McCarthyism (Dark Matters), immigrants to America (Come with Me to Babylon), 12th- century England (THE SAINT-MAKERS, Cross Cultural Communications, 2009), and Soviet Russia (Stalin's Barber).