Kay Darowski was a web editor for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and for a decade supervised student research assistants on the project when this was written. She received a BA in history, completed coursework for an MA in history at Brigham Young University, and earned a diploma from the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has worked at Petersburg National Battlefield in Petersburg, Virginia, and the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. She has been a developmental editor and copyeditor for college history textbooks, as well as for other books and articles.