Cole Swensen is the author of 17 collections of poetry and a volume of critical essays. Books of hers have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the S.F. State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series and have been finalists once for the National Book Award and twice for the L.A. Times Book Award. A former Guggenheim Fellow and the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid, she is also the translator of 20 volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism, one of which won a PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. She divides her time between Paris and Providence, RI, where she teaches at Brown University.
Karen Pava Randall is a book artist dedicated to publishing contemporary, innovative poetry. She founded Propolis Press in 2001 with the philosophy that there should be no one-size-fits-all approach to poetic texts. She works in a variety of media ranging from the traditional (letterpress printing and gum bichromate photography) to the very modern (embedded QR codes and interactive electronic circuitry). She has collaborated on books with Rosmarie Waldrop, Lee Ann Brown, Nancy Kuhl, Elizabeth Willis, and many others. Her books are held in the collections of Brown, Columbia, Harvard, New York, Stanford, Wesleyan and Yale Universities; the Universities of Buffalo, Chicago, Delaware, and Iowa; Connecticut, Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Smith, Trinity, Union, and Wellesley Colleges; the New York Public Library and The Library of Congress. She was born in Iowa City, Iowa and currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts with a reference librarian and two tuxedo cats (who frequently enjoy interrupting the creative process).