Namdeo Dhasal was born in 1949 , in a former 'untouchable community' in Pur-Kanersar village near Pune in Maharashtra. As a teenage taxi driver he lived among pimps, prostitues, petty criminals, and gangsters in Bombay's underworld. He has had very little formal education. In 1972, he founded Dalit Panther, the militant organisation inspired by the Black Panther movement. The same year he published Golpitha. Since then he has published eight collections of poems from which this selection is drawn. In 2004 Sahitya Akademi hounered Dhasal with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dhasal's long-time friend and bilingual poet Dilip Chitre, acclaimed for his translations of the seventeen century Marathi poet-saint Tukaram, has translated Dhasal into English.

Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the US in 1975, and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003), American Tatts (Chax 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School 2006) and Jam Alerts (Chax 2007), with a novel, Love Like Hate, scheduled to be released in 2008 by Seven Stories Press. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, Best American Poetry 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and he has been invited to read his works all over the US, London, Cambridge, Berlin and Reykjavik. He has also published widely in Vietnamese.