Breece D'J Pancake (June 29, 1952 - April 8, 1979) was born in West Virginia. He attended Marshall University and was a graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he took his life before he was twenty-seven. Pancake published only a few short stories in his lifetime, which together with a handful of others that were unpublished at the time of his death, were collected in The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (1983).
Born and raised in West Virginia, Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of two short-story collections, Black Tickets and Fast Lanes, and five novels, including Machine Dreams, Lark & Termite, and most recently Quiet Dell. She directs the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark in New Jersey.
