Yang Jisheng was born in 1940, joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1964, and worked for the Xinhua News Agency from January 1968 until his retirement in 2001. For fifteen years, he was a deputy editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu (Chronicles of History), an official journal that regularly skirted censorship with articles on controversial political topics. In 2015, he resigned under official pressure. For his groundbreaking work Tombstone, Yang won Sweden's Stieg Larsson Prize for journalistic courage in 2015, and the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism, presented by the Nieman Fellows at Harvard University, in 2016. Tombstone also won the Manhattan Institute's 2013 Hayek Book Prize and the 2013 Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide. Yang Jisheng lives in Beijing with his wife and two children.

Stacy Mosher learned Chinese in Hong Kong, where she lived for more than seventeen years. A longtime journalist, Mosher currently works as a translator and editor in Brooklyn, New York.

Guo Jian is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Originally trained in the Chinese language and literature, Guo was on the Chinese faculty of Beijing Normal University until he came to the United States to study for his Ph.D. in English in the mid-1980s.