Susan Larson is the host of the weekly radio show, The Reading Life, on WWNO-FM, New Orleans's NPR affiliate, and the author of The Booklover's Guide to New Orleans, which has appeared in two editions. Before that, she served as the book editor for The New Orleans Times-Picayune from 1988-2009. In 2009 and 2012, she chaired the jury for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She is the founding president of the Women's National Book Association of New Orleans.

J.M. Redmann's mystery series features New Orleans PI Micky Knight. Her books have won First Place in the ForeWord mystery category, and three Lambda Literary awards. The Intersection of Law and Desire was an Editor’s Choice of the San Francisco Chronicle. Writing as R. Jean Reid, her book Roots of Murder will be published by Midnight Ink in the summer of 2016. Redmann lives in New Orleans.

Alison Fensterstock writes about American music and culture for outlets including NPR, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and others. She's been a staff arts critic for the alt-weekly Gambit and the daily Times-Picayune in New Orleans, and was the founding program director for the Ponderosa Stomp Foundation. She also writes a column on the occult for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities' quarterly magazine, and is usually covered in dog hair.

Mary A. McCay, professor emerita of English, Loyola University New Orleans, has been a judge for the Pinckley Prize since its inception eleven years ago. She has published several books and scholarly articles, and her creative work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Providence Journal, New Orleans Review, and Xavier Review. She was the inaugural director of the Walker Percy Center for Writing and Publishing. Additionally, she served as a contributing editor to the Feminist Companion to Literature in English, for which she wrote the entry on Rachel Carson, and wrote the introduction to the Easton Press edition of Silent Spring. She has lectured extensively on Rachel Carson and her work.