Marion Garrard Barnwell is professor emerita of English at Delta State University. She is editor of A Place Called Mississippi: Collected Narratives; coauthor of Touring Literary Mississippi; and coeditor of Fannye Cook: Mississippi’s Pioneering Conservationist, all published by University Press of Mississippi. Her fiction has been published in the edited collections Mad Dogs and Moonshine, Christmas Stories from Mississippi, and On the Way Home; and her essays have appeared in magazines such as Delta Magazine and Portico. She is a board member and past president of Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and Jackson Friends of the Library.

Mary DuBose Trice Clark (1879–1967) was born on Christmas day in Okalona, Mississippi. Her father was a bookkeeper and owned a mercantile business. Her mother was a teacher and later a principal when the family moved to Tupelo. After high school, she attended Belmont College in Nashville, Tennessee, and graduated in 1897 with a degree in music. In 1900, she married Robert Baker Clark, a banker who would become president of the Federal Landbank of Tupelo and later president of the Federal Landbank in New Orleans. Over her long life, Clark taught music, worked as a switchboard operator for the first telephone company in Tupelo, ran a dress shop, and raised five children.