Toma? ?alamun was born in 1941 in Zagreb, Croatia and raised in Koper, Slovenia. He published more than fifty books of poetry in Slovenian during his lifetime, and he is not only recognized as a leading figure of the Slovenian poetic avant-garde but is also considered one of the leading contemporary poets of Central Europe. In 1996 he became the Slovenian Cultural Attaché in New York and lived in the US intermittently until his death in 2014. His honors include the Preseren Fund Prize, the Jenko Prize, Laurel Wreath, Poetry and People Prize, Njego? Prize, Europäsche Prize, Pushcart Prize, a visiting Fulbright to Columbia University, and a fellowship to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Besides teaching at several distinguished universities and having his work appear in over seventy journals and magazines internationally, he has had fifteen collections of poems published in English so far. All together, his poetry has been translated into over twenty languages around the world, numbering over eighty volumes. He leaves an expanding legacy with readers and especially with the many young poets who were influenced by his work.

Sonja Kravanja is the recipient of several translation grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and she received the Columbia University Translation Center Merit Award and a Pushcart Prize for her translations of Tomaz Salamun. A native of Slovenia, she now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.