Judith Lee Johnson Jones was born September 13, 1940 and spent her childhood in Oklahoma and Texas. In 1958, she was one of the winners of the Houston’s Chronicle contest that added the Texas Copa Girls to perform at the Sands Hotel and Casino. For Jones, the experience was a period of fun-filled freedom, followed by relentless encouragement from others to attend college, which she reluctantly did. To her surprise, she embraced college life, took her studies seriously, and received an education degree. She also became Miss Houston.

Richard Wiley is author of numerous stories and the novels Soldiers In Hiding (winner of the PEN/?Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction) Fools' Gold, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, Indigo, Ahmed's Revenge, and Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show ("The best book you've never heard of!"-anonymous). His most recent novel is The Book of Important Moments. Richard has lived and worked in Korea (where he was a Peace Corps volunteer), Japan, Nigeria and Kenya. Many of his stories are taken from those experiences.

Prentiss Walker was born October 18th, 1910 on an Indian reservation in Comanche County in southwestern Oklahoma. His youth was spent in Stockton, California, and Phoenix, Arizona. His father had been a minister in the Methodist Pentecostal Church. In 1933 he came to Las Vegas, Nevada. He worked in various places including at a café, the Mercury Test Site, a trailer park, a used car lot, and multiple retail stores. In 1956 he was ordained into the ministry of the Baptist Church.

Richard Francis was born in Compton, California on July 27, 1907. He moved to Las Vegas, Nevada on December 25, 1931. He was a truck driver, cableway operator, and a rigger foreman.