Wini Moranville has worked as a professional food and wine writer and restaurant reviewer for leading magazines, newspapers, and websites for more than 25 years. She has spent more than twenty summers living and cooking in France, in Paris as well as in the cities and villages of the provinces, often in the kitchens of the French home cooks she has befriended over the years. When not in France, she lives with her husband, David Wolf, in Des Moines, and writes and blogs about French cooking and other topics at www.winimoranville.com. She is currently at work on a culinary memoir titled Cheap Wine in the Open Air: Reflections on What Truly Matters at the Table. 

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Good Wives, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys. Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s.