Robert K. Elder is a journalist, author and former editor-in-chief of the Oak Leaves, which Ernest Hemingway delivered as a teen. Elder is the Director of Digital Product Development and Strategy for Crain Communications.

His six previous books include Last Words of the Executed, The Best Film You’ve Never Seen and The Film That Changed My Life. Elder’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Salon.com, The Oregonian and many other publications.

Elder’s love for archives began in the late 1990s, when he annotated author Ken Kesey’s letters at the Knight Library on the University of Oregon campus.

A Montana native, Elder lives and writes in Chicagoland. He wrote most of this book on a poker table, which he thinks Hemingway would approve of.

Mark Cirino received his PhD at the Graduate Center-CUNY. He is the co-editor of Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory (Kent State UP 2010) and is the author of Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action (U of Wisconsin Press 2012). He serves as the General Editor for Kent State University Press’s ‘Reading Hemingway’ series, for which he wrote the 2016 volume on Across the River and into the Trees.

He taught creative writing and American literature at New York University for eight years, and he is the author of two novels, Name the Baby (Anchor 1998) and Arizona Blues (Rogner & Bernhard 2000). His fiction has been published in Drunken Boat, and his scholarly work has been published in The Hemingway Review, The Mailer Review, Papers on Language and Literature, Voices in Italian Americana, and PMLA. 

Aaron Vetch is a writer and editor living in Seattle. A Montana native and graduate of Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, Vetch prefers fiction, but now knows more about bullfighting, boats and Michigan getaways than any of us.