Megan McNamer is a fiction author, essayist, and musician from northern Montana. She studied music as an undergraduate at the University of Montana, and earned an MA in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington. Her first novel Children and Lunatics won the Big Moose Price. She now lives in Missoula, where she performs Balinese gamelan music and writes.

Robert Garfias was born in San Francisco in 1932, the child of Mexican-American parents. As a youngster he studied classical guitar and jazz saxophone. In high school he studied Western classical music composition, and he formed a jazz combo that played gigs for beatniks in the North Beach area of San Francisco, where he traveled in a circle of musicians that included Dave Brubeck, Vince Delgado, Vince Guaraldi, Harry Partch, and Bill Smith. During his career he founded the ethnomusicology program at the University of Washington; served as Dean of Arts at the University of California, Irvine, as a member of the Smithsonian Council, and as a presidential appointee to the U.S. National Council for the Arts; and conducted significant periods of fieldwork and language study in Japan, Okinawa, Korea, the Philippines, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Central America, Burma, Romania, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and among Okinawans in the United States.- Society for Ethnomusicology Newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 4, September 2013)