Yang Jisheng was born in 1940, joined the Communist Party in 1964, and worked for the Xinhua News Agency from 1968 until his retirement in 2001. For fifteen years, he was a deputy editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu, an official journal that regularly skirts censorship with articles on controversial political topics. In 2015, he resigned under official pressure. Yang serves on the editorial board of Economic Reference and continues to write political commentaries. For Tombstone, Yang won Sweden's Stieg Larsson Prize for journalistic courage, the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism, the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Prize, and the Lemkin Book Award of the Institute for the Study of Genocide. Yang lives in Beijing with his wife and two children. Stacy Mosher learned Chinese in Hong Kong, where she lived for eighteen years. A longtime journalist, she currently works as an editor and translator in Brooklyn, New York. Guo Jian is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Originally trained in Chinese language and literature, he was on the Chinese faculty of Beijing Normal University until he came to the United States to study for his PhD in English in the mid-1980s.