Dr. Lopez has spent over twenty years working in higher education as a researcher, program administrator, and faculty member at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. She has taught college writing and literature for the past fourteen years in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley. She holds a Ph.D. in English with a focus on Latinx literature and rhetorical studies from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her dissertation examines Chicana representation in contemporary young adult literature.

Michael Romero is the Director of the Pastoral Institute at the University of the Incarnate Word. He completed his Ph.D. in Theology at the University of Dayton in Ohio in Spring of 2022, defending his dissertation with distinction. His dissertation studied the evangelization of Mesoamericans by the sixteenth-century Spanish friars with a focus on their teaching of Marian devotion. Dr. Romero's areas of research interest are the Catholic Church of colonial New Spain, Mariology, and Franciscan spirituality and history.