Xhevdet Bajraj, a Kosovar poet and dramatist, has published more than twenty books of verse, which have been translated into many languages. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them, the prize for best book of poetry (both in 1993 and 2000), conferred by the Kosovo Writers’ Society; the Goliardos International Prize for Poetry in 2004; and the 2010 Katarina Josipi award for best original drama written in Albanian. In May of 1999, Bajraj and his family were deported from Kosovo. Through the International Parliament of Writers and their program for persecuted writers, he was granted asylum and a fellowship at the Casa Refugio Citlaltepetl in Mexico. In the years since, he has become a professor of creative writing and literature at the Autonomous University of Mexico City and been inducted into the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

"Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born writer, literary translator, educator, and author of eight books and chapbooks of poetry. Her translation of Negative Space (New Directions, 2018) was a PEN Award finalist and shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. She is an English PEN winner, NEA fellow, Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, and Pauline Scheer fellow at GrubStreet."