About the Authors:

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, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, Purgatorio, and Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Her translation of Paradiso will be published by Graywolf in 2025.

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way Books 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way 2020), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award among other honors. His other honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Cave Canem Foundation. Currently, he is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Wesleyan University.