Adonis, born Ali Ahmad Said Esber in Syria, is a poet, translator, essayist, and critic based in Paris. His work, including the first complete translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into Arabic (Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation), won him the 2011 Goethe Prize and made him a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Esther Allen is a writer and translator. She is a professor at Baruch College and in the Ph.D. Programs in Comparative Literature,  French and in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at City University of New York Graduate Center. She  directs Baruch’s Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. Her essays, translations and interviews have appeared in  the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, Words Without Borders, Bomb, LitHub, the New Yorker and other publications.