Margaret Brown Kilik was raised by a single mother, and they moved frequently throughout the country during her childhood. Kilik graduated from the University of Toledo with a degree in English and subsequently lived in San Antonio, where she renewed a relationship with Eugene Kilik, whom she married. They spent the majority of their lives in New York City, where Kilik established and ran the Key Gallery in Soho. She was a collage artist and writer, and her only novel, The Duchess of Angus, written in the early 1950s, was discovered after her death. She died in New Jersey in 2001.
Jenny Davidson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of four novels and four books of literary criticism. She was a fellow of the inaugural cohort at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in 2018–19, and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and Columbia University's Lenfest Distinguished Faculty and Mark Van Doren Teaching Awards, among other honors.
Char Miller, who grew up in Darien, CT, received his BA from Pitzer College, and his MA and Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. For 26 wonderful years, he taught U. S. history and urban studies at Trinity University in San Antonio. Now he directs the Environmental Analysis Program at Pomona College (Claremont CA), where he is the W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis. Miller has served as a Contributing Writer for the Texas Observer, and as Associate Editor of Environmental History and the Journal of Forestry. He is a Senior Fellow at the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, and writes a column for KCET (Los Angeles), entitled Golden Green, which focuses on environmental issues in California and the west.
Laura Hernández-Ehrisman is an associate professor and chair of the Department of University Studies at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, and the author of Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio.
