Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was born in Paris and lived there for many years. He held salons whose regular visitors included W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and many others. Mallarmé is widely regarded as one of the most important figures of 19th century French poetry. Jeff Clark was born in southern California. The author of The Little Door Slides Back and Ruins , among other works, he has made his living as a book designer for twenty years. He's won many awards for his book and catalog design, and his designs have been featured in The New Yorker, Better Living Through Design, Cool Hunting, Ploughshares, and Granta.

His studio, Quemadura, is based in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he is also active in community organizing and public artmaking. Robert Bononno has been a freelance translator from the French for more than 20 years. He was an adjunct professor in New York University's Translation Studies program and at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Bononno is credited with the translation of over a dozen full-length books and numerous shorter pieces. These include René Crevel's My Body and I , a finalist for the 2005 French-American Foundation Prize, Hervé Guibert's Ghost Image , and Henri Raczymow's Swan's Way . In 2002 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to complete a translation of the non-fiction work of Isabelle Eberhardt and in 2010 he received an NEA grant for the retranslation of Eugène Sue's classic crime novel, The Mysteries of Paris . Bononno's latest translation, Jean Grenier's Considerations on the Death of a Dog , was published by Turtle Point Press in 2013.