About Us

We’re a coauthor duo from Ames, Iowa. 

Ryan Lilith Jeffrey is a trans woman who went to school as a theater major, left with a degree in biology, worked as a chocolatier and for sixteen years now as a solar panel engineer, during which time she also opened a restaurant with her wife, and until now has focused her love of writing on running multi-year RPG campaigns. 

Amy Erica Smith is a (cisgender) political science professor, Carnegie Fellow, and restless polyglot who has interviewed fundamentalist evangelicals, leftist radicals, and military regime enthusiasts across the Andes mountains and Amazon rainforest. She’s published four academic books (Oxford and Cambridge University Presses), two of which were in Portuguese (!), as well as numerous journalistic and academic articles. In 2021, she won a local school board seat. 

As fifth graders, we were both unfashionably fond of dictionaries.

 

Here, in our first blog post, we talk about what it’s like to work together.

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