David Shields is the author of twenty books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications); The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (a New York Times bestseller); Black Planet (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); and, forthcoming over the next year, War Is Beautiful (powerHouse Books) and Other People (Knopf). I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, co-written by Caleb Powell and published by Knopf in January 2015, has been adapted by James Franco into a film that premiered in April 2015 at Vancouver's DOXA documentary film festival. Shields's work has been translated into twenty languages.

Samantha Matthews is an American actress who lives in Barcelona with her partner and two children.