Doug Wright's Quills received the 1995 Kesselring Prize for Best New American Play from the National Arts Club and a 1995 Village Voice Obie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting. Wright also wrote the screenplay adaptation of Quills, making his motion picture debut. The film was named Best Picture by the National Board of Review and was also nominated for three Oscars. Some of Wright's other plays include Interrogating the Nude, Watbanaland, The Stonewater Rapture, Dinosaurs, and a musical, Buzzsaw Berkeley, which features songs by Michael John LaChiusa. Wright has a bachelor's degree from Yale University and an M.F.A. from NYU. A member of the Dramatists Guild and the New York Theatre Workshop, he has taught playwriting at NYU and Princeton University.

Oliver Wyman, a native New Yorker, has appeared on stage as well as in film, and television.  He is one of the founders of New York City's Collective Unconscious theater, and his performances include the award-winning “reality play” Charlie Victor Romeo and A.R. McElhinney's cult classic film A Chronicle of Corpses.  He also lent his voice to several episodes of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Oliver's work as a narrator extends to over 150 audiobooks and has won many him awards, including Audie awards for his reading of Lance Armstrong's autobiography, It's Not About the Bike, and Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat.  He also read James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, Tim Dorsey's Atomic Lobster, and David Weber's By Schism Rent Asunder.  Oliver has won five Audie Awards from the Audio Publisher's Association, fourteen Earphone Awards from AudioFile Magazine, and two Listen Up Awards from Publisher's Weekly. Oliver was named a 2008 Best Voice in Nonfiction & Culture by AudioFile Magainze.

Federico García Lorca was born in 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a few miles outside Granada in the province of Andalusia, southern Spain. From an early age he was fascinated by Spain's mixed heritage, adapting its ancient folk songs, ballads, lullabies, and flamenco music into poems and plays. By the age of thirty, he had published five books of poems, culminating in 1928 with Gypsy Ballads, which brought him far-reaching fame. In 1929-30 he studied in New York City, where he wrote the poems—among his most socially engaging and compelling—that were to be published posthumously as Poet in New York. Upon returning to Spain he devoted much of his attention to theater, "the poetry which rises from the page . . . and becomes human." In 1936, at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, he was shot to death by anti-Republican rebels in Franco's army, and his books were banned and destroyed.

Christopher Maurer, the editor of García Lorca's Selected Verse, Poet in New York, and other works, is the author of numerous books and articles on Spanish poetry. He is head of the Department of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Illinois-Chicago

Michael Dewell, a graduate of Yale University and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, was until his death in 1994 the president of the National Repertory Theatre Foundation, for which he produced a wide range of works, from Euripides to Arthur Miller. NRT has toured the United States, played on Broadway, and won many awards, including a special Tony for distinguished contribution to the American theater. Dewell also wrote many articles on theater.

Carmen Zapata is president of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, a Hispanic-American theater in Los Angeles, which has played on tour throughout the United States and at theater festivals in Colombia, Spain, and Mexico. She has produced more than sixty plays for BFA, in English and in Spanish. Most widely known as a leading actress in American films and television, she was knighted by King Juan Carlos of Spain in 1990 and received California's Governor's Award for Achievement in the Arts in 1991.