Betty Watson was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1928. She received her BA in Art History from Wellesley College in 1949 and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1965. She studied lithography with the abstract-expressionist John Opper and has painted portraits of poets Randall Jarrell and Allen Tate. Having exhibited her work in numerous galleries and cities, including New York, Provincetown, Chapel Hill, Norfolk, and elsewhere, she recently had a painting purchased by the Smithsonian for the National Portrait Gallery.

Steve Featherstone is a writer and photographer from Syracuse, New York. His work has appeared in many magazines, including Harper’s, Granta, and Oxford American. A book of his photographs about writer Joseph Mitchell, coauthored with Paul Maliszewski, is forthcoming in 2010 from Princeton Architectural Press.