How do I remove excess whitespace being generated by an EL tag in JSP?

Question

The idea is to print the authors of each book and to add a comma in between each author. The generated HTML is adding tons of white space, which creates a single space between the comma and the next name. See screenshot. I'm trying to remove that excess space.

<div class="row">
    <div class="col-md-12">
        <c:forEach items="${book.authors}" var="author" varStatus="loop">
            ${author.firstName} ${author.middleInitials} ${author.lastName}
            <c:choose>
                <c:when test="${author.postNominalInitials != null}">
                    ${author.postNominalInitials}
                </c:when>
            </c:choose>
            <c:if test="${!loop.last}">,</c:if>
        </c:forEach>
    </div>
</div>

The goal is to remove the space after each author's name (and eventually replace the final comma with 'and')

Here's the readout from the Google inspector, where I'm seeing the additional white space being added.

Thank you for the help!