After spending the 1990s as a homeless heroin addict in San Francisco, Joe Clifford got off the streets and turned his life around. He earned his MFA from Florida International University in 2008, before returning to the Bay Area, where he currently lives with his wife and two sons. His autobiographical novel, Junkie Love, chronicles his battle with drugs and was published by Battered Suitcase (2010).

Rex Weiner is a journalist and author whose stories about a detective working in the music industry, serialized in the New York Rocker and LA Weekly in 1979–80, became the controversial Andrew Dice Clay movie, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, directed by Renny Harlin for 20th Century Fox, released in 1990. Those original stories have been published by Rare Bird Books.

Joe Clifford is acquisitions editor for Gutter Books and producer of Lip Service West, a "gritty, real, raw" reading series in Oakland, CA. His bestselling Jay Porter Thriller Series (Oceanview Publishing) has received rave reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among many others. Joe is also editor of Trouble in the Heartland: Crime Stories Based on the Songs of Bruce Springsteen and the forthcoming Just to Watch Him Die: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Johnny Cash. Currently Joe teaches online writing courses for LitReactor and around the country at various conferences and retreats.

Both have contributed an essay to the recently released collection GO ALL THE WAY: A LITERARY APPRECIATION OF POWER POP, edited but Paul Myers and S.W. Lauden.