Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein coauthored this book. They are a married pair. Both teach English at the college level. They focus on teaching writing, composition, and communication. Each has published scholarly writing on the subject, both separately and as coauthors. Along with They Say/I Say, Graff and Birkenstein have also cowritten articles for a variety of publications including The Chronicle of Higher Education (a periodical focusing on American colleges and universities) and College Composition and Communication (a scholarly journal published by the association of the same name).

Gerald Graff holds a PhD in English and American literature from Stanford University, which he received in the early 1960s. He has taught at Northeastern University and the University of Chicago and is a professor of English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). While his earliest academic work focuses on literary analysis, his later work (for which he is best known) focuses on pedagogy. Graff is also a cofounder of UIC’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH) and was president of the Modern Language Association in 2008.

Cathy Birkenstein is a lecturer in English at UIC, where she regularly coteaches courses with Graff. She holds a PhD in American literature.