Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems, including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy (all Graywolf), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in July 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi—forthcoming from Princeton University Press Lockert Poetry in Translation Series in November 2024. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Matthias Göritz is the author of three volumes of poetry—Loops (2001), Pools (2006), and Tools (2012)—and two novels: The Short Dream of Jakob Voss (2005, winner of the Hamburg Literature Prize, Radio Bavaria Prize, and Mara Cassens Prize) and Dreamers and Sinners (2013). He is the William Gass Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.