Clayton Eshleman is a poet, editor, and translator. He was born in Indianapolis in 1935 and has received from Indiana University a BA in philosophy (1958) and a Master of Arts in Teaching in creative writing in 1961. His translations include César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Aimé Césaire, Antonin Artaud, Michel Deguy, Bernard Bador, and Arthur Rimbaud. He won the National Book Award in 1979, with José Rubia Barcia, for their translation of The Complete Posthumous Poetry of César Vallejo and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2007 for his translation of Vallejo's Complete Poetry. He has held teaching positions at the California Institute of the Arts and Eastern Michigan University, and founded the magazines Caterpillar, 1967-1973, and Sulfur, 1981-2000. His own poetry is influenced by mythology, Buddhism, jazz, and cave paintings.

Jack Hirschman is a poet, translator, and left-wing activist. He was born in New York City in 1933. He received his BA from the City College of New York in 1955 and his MA (1957) and PhD (1961) from Indiana University in comparative literature. At the age of 19, he sent one of his short stories to author Ernest Hemingway; the reply was published after Hemingway's death as "A Letter to a Young Writer." In the 1950s and 60s, he taught English at Dartmouth College and UCLA, but was fired during the Vietnam War for his left-wing politics. He then moved to San Francisco, where he is a street poet and activist and a member of the Union of Street Poets. He has translated from many languages, including Russian, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Albanian, Yiddish, Vietnamese, and Haitian Creole. He is a prolific poet, with over 50 volumes of poetry published in small runs at small presses.