Tedi López Mills is one of Mexico's foremost poets writing today. Born in Mexico City in 1959, she studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and literature at the Sorbonne. She is the author of ten books of poetry and two essay collections, several of which have received national literary prizes, including the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, "Mexico's Pulitzer Prize," for her verse novel Muerte en la rúa Augusta (2009). López Mills sets the pace for her contemporaries with work that is linguistically inventive and philosophically rigorous. She invokes the classics, the troubadours, and the pastoral tradition with an underlying skepticism about language, landscape, and causality that keeps her work current, engaging the eye while troubling the "I." She lives in Mexico City, Mexico.

Wendy Burk was the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship to translate Against the Current. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Deer and The Place Names The Place Named, and the translator of Tedi López Mills’s While Light Is Built. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Colorado Review, and other journals. She lives in Tucson, AZ.