Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1925. He is the author of more than 60 poetry collections, including For Love (1967), Later (1979), and Life and Death (1998). Creeley 's honors include a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, a Frost Medal, a Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2002 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Robert Creeley died in 2005.

Named Sidney, Corman was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He received his B.A. from Tufts University in 1945 and did graduate work at the Universities of Michigan and North Carolina. In 1949 Corman created "This is Poetry" a radio program airing on WMEX in Boston which ran for three years. His next venture was a poetry magazine, Origin which featured and sometimes debuted such poets as Robert Creeley, William Bronk, Denise Levertov, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, and Louis Zukofsky. Corman later established Origin Press, publishing some of these same authors as well as his own works. In the late 1950s he moved to Kyoto, Japan where he found work as a private teacher of English and poetry. He married Shizumi Konishi in 1965 and opened C.C.'s, a coffee and dessert shop that also served as a venue for poetry readings. He lived in the States several times over the years, but in 1982 moved permanently to Kyoto where he remained until his death in March 2004. His published works include over 100 books and pamphlets of poetry, translations of French, Italian and Japanese poets, and several volumes of essays.