Svetozar Daniel Simko was born in Bratislava in 1959, and emigrated with his family following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He was educated at Oberlin College and earned a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University and a Master of Library Science at Pratt Institute in New York. In 1986, he was awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His translation of Georg Trakl, Autumn Sonata, received the Poet’s House Translation Prize and was published by Moyer-Bell, Ltd. in 1988 and 1998. His own poetry has been translated into Czech, Slovak and German, and a collection entitled Svet V Stratenej Rukavci (The World Within a Lost Glove) was published posthumously in Bratislava. He worked as a librarian at the New York Public Library until his death in 2004.
Carolyn Forché is Lannan Professor of Poetry at Georgetown University. Her most recent books include The Angel of History and Blue Hour.
James Reidel is a poet, translator, editor, and biographer. His forthcoming projects include Love Is Like Park Avenue: The Fiction of Alvin Levin (New Directions), with John Ashbery, and A Pale Blue Lady’s Hand (Godine), a novel by Franz Werfel.