Brian Thomas Isaac was born in 1950 on the Okanagan Indian Reserve. After completing grade eight, he found work in the Alberta oil fields and in construction, eventually retiring as a bricklayer. He came to writing late in life.

In 2022, his bestselling debut, All the Quiet Places, won an Indigenous Voices Award, was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and was longlisted for the Giller Prize and CBC's Canada Reads. He lives with his wife in West Kelowna, BC.

Conor Kerr is a national award losing Métis/Ukrainian writer and bird hunter living in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), born in Saskatoon, and raised in Buffalo Pound Lake and Drayton Valley. He is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. His Ukrainian family are settlers on Treaty 4 Territory. Conor is the author of the novels Avenue of Champions (2021), which won the 2022 RELIT Award, and Prairie Edge (2024), which was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize and the 2024 Writer's Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Award and won the Crime Writers of Canada Best Novel award; as well as the poetry collections An Explosion of Feathers, and Old Gods which was shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General's Award for Poetry and named one of CBC's Best Books of 2023. His latest book is the poetic novella, Beaver Hills Forever (2025).