Daniela Danz was born in Eisenach in 1976. In 2024 she held the professorship of poetics at the University of Bamberg and curated the international Poetica festival in Cologne. She is vice president of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature and the Bavarian and Saxon Academies of the Arts. She has worked as an art cataloger and museum director; currently she directs a nationwide youth competition to foster democracy. She is the author of five books of poetry, two novels, and an essay collection, all in German. She lives with her family in Kranichfeld, a small town in rural Thuringia, Germany.

Monika Cassel is a poet and translator who has received the 2024 John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation from the Poetry Foundation and been featured in Deep Vellum's Best Literary Translations 2025 anthology. She has been awarded a Travel Fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association as well as a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, and she attended JUNIVERS, an international meeting for translators of German poetry at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. A former educator whose work teaching creative writing to high school students was supported by the Lannan Foundation, she lives in Portland, Oregon, and is an assistant poetry editor for Four Way Review.