Wini Moranville is a food and wine writer/editor whose stories have appeared in lifestyle magazines including Better Homes and Gardens, Country Home, Simply Perfect Italian, Holiday Appetizers, Holiday Celebrations, Holiday Menus, and Creative Home, among others. She has also served as a writer and editor for numerous cookbooks under the Better Homes and Gardens imprint, including the past three editions of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. Since 1997, she has also written over 500 restaurant reviews for The Des Moines Register. She currently writes a monthly wine column for Relish, is a member of the James Beard Foundation, and has served as a Restaurant Awards panelist there since 2005.
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.