Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District (2010) and House of Lords and Commons (2016). He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears (2008) and Collected Body (2011). She has received the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokins Prize for Poetry, the Amy Clampitt Fellowship, and the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors. With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort coedited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (2014). Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University. Her new book in Belarusian, Rose Pandemic, came out in Minsk in May.