Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) was one of Poland’s most important contemporary poets. His works include Tremor, Mysticism for Beginners, Without End: New and Selected Poems, and Asymmetry (all Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Zagajewski won many awards, including the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2010 European Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Zhongkun International Poetry Prize.

Clare Cavanagh is a literary critic, a Slavist, and a translator. Her books include Czeslaw Milosz and His Age: A Critical Life (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale University Press), and Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton University Press).