Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast, and is the author of nine books of poetry and four prose works, and the winner of several awards including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize (for his translation of Dante’s Inferno). He Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University, Belfast. Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India and raised in Columbus, Ohio. His poetry collections include 3 Sections, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; The Long Meadow (2003), and Wild Kingdom (1996). He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, where he has held the Michele Tolela Myers Chair.