Laila Familiar is a lecturer in Arabic at the University of Texas at Austin. She has taught language and content-based courses in several renowned programs of Arabic, and was director of the Arabic Summer Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, 2012-13. She has a Master's degree in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language from the American University in Cairo.

Hoda Barakat is a contemporary Lebanese-born novelist writing in the Arabic language. She worked as a teacher, translator, and journalist during the Lebanese Civil War, and it is during this war that her later novels are set. Her works have won several awards, including the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.