Born and raised in Hollywood, Florida, William Villalongo lives and works in Brooklyn. Represented by Susan Inglett Gallery in New York, he has had one-person exhibitions at institutions such as Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut (2013) and Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis (2007). He received his B.F.A. from The Cooper Union and his M.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He did a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2002. Villalongo, who has participated in group shows at the Studio Museum, Harlem; Seattle Art Museum; and MoCA Cleveland, among other institutions, has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2012), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2006), and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2005). He is an Associate Professor at The Cooper Union School of Art.

Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast (2017) and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (2016). She has been awarded a 2019 Rome Prize, a Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, and fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. She was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Sealey has been a visiting professor at the City College of New York and Boston University and was a 2019–2020 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.