Author of over fifteen collections of poetry and seven volumes of fiction, Jean Daive has been an important voice in French letters for over 35 years. His first book of poetry, Décimale blanche, published in 1967, received much attention; his subsequent volumes have often been ongoing, serial volumes—Narration d'équilibre, Trilogie du Temps, La Condition d'infini—each exploring a specific concept and/or formal question across three or more volumes. Daive's work has received extensive critical attention both in full-length volumes and numerous articles. Also a translator, he has published translations of the poetry of Paul Celan, Robert Creeley, Norma Cole, and others. Daive has also exerted great influence: during his decades of work in radio, as a producer at France Culture; as president of the Centre International de Poésieà Marseille (CiPM); and as the founder and editor of four successive poetry journals: Fragment in 1969, fig. in 1989, Fin in 1999, and K.O.S.H.K.O.N.O.N.G. in 2013. He lives and works in Paris.

Poet, translator, and editor Rosmarie Waldrop has been a forceful presence in American and international poetry for over forty years. Born in Germany in 1935, Waldrop studied literature and musicology before immigrating to the United States in the late 1950s. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1966. While at the University of Michigan, Waldrop married poet and translator Keith Waldrop. In 1961 the Waldrops began Burning Deck Magazine. The magazine evolved into Burning Deck Press, one of the most influential publishers for innovative poetry in the United States. She has lived in Providence, Rhode Island since 1968 and she has taught at Wesleyan University, Tufts, and Brown. She has become the leading English translator of Edmond Jabès’s writing, translating over a dozen volumes of his work. In 1993 she was awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for her translation of Jabès’s The Book of Margins, and was named “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres” by the French government. Waldrop has authored over 20 books of her own writing, including poetry, fiction, and essays. In 2006 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Robert Kaufman is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also teaches in, and is past co-director of, the interdisciplinary Program in Critical Theory. Kaufman is the author of Negative Romanticism: Adornian Aesthetics in Keats, Shelley, and Modern Poetry (forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2021), and is at work on two related books, Why Poetry Should Matter—to the Left: Frankfurt Constellations of Democracy and Modernism after Postmodernism? Robert Duncan and the Future-Present of American Poetry. His essays on modern poetry, aesthetics, and critical theory have been published in numerous journals and edited volumes.

Philip Gerard received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019; he is currently a research fellow at the Centre interdisciplinaire d’étude des littératures at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Gerard's article "Pound Notes in German Markets: Paul Celan, Usury, and the Postwar Currency of Ezra Pound" appeared in the January 2020 issue of Modernism/modernity, and he is completing a book manuscript on poetic transmission and ruptured history with the provisional title Speaking After: Ezra Pound, Paul Celan, and the Modernist Task of the Translation