Malinda Markham has an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from the University of Denver. Her first book of poetry, Ninety-five Nights of Listening, won the Bakeless Prize and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. She recently finished a second manuscript, Those Who Came Running. Her poems have been widely published in the US, and translations have appeared in Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, Factorial, and on the web. She currently works as an equities translator at a major securities firm in Tokyo.

Born in Japan and raised in the UK and Mexico, Yu Nakai often engages in music composition and performance. His works include "why not gramophone" and "pictogramophone," performed at BankArt in Yokohama in 2004. As a scholar, his extensive research on the work of John Cage focuses on the composer’s use of media technology and its relationship to his notational methods. The result has been assembled in his MA thesis for the University of Tokyo, "The medium of silence/Silence of the medium -- The manner of operation in John Cage’s work." Since 2001, he has been involved with the Yotsuya Art Studium in various capacities -- as a student, researcher, translator, instructor and editorial staff of the magazine artictoc. He has recently started a music-blog.

Sawako Nakayasu’s books include Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (Quale Press, 2005) and So we have been given time Or, (Verse Press, 2004). Forthcoming is a collection of translations of the Japanese modernist poet Chika Sagawa (Seeing Eye Books, 2007). In 2006 she was awarded a Witter Bynner Foundation residency and a PEN Translation Fund Grant. Current projects include an Ant collaboration with the painter Chris Martin, and completing the translation of For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide.

Cole Swensen is the author of eleven books of poetry including Noon, The Book of a Hundred Hands, and Goest, which was a National Book Award Finalist. She has translated books by Pierre Alferi, Olivier Cadiot, and others, and her translation of Jean Fremon’s Island of the Dead won the PEN USA award in 2004. She is also the founder and editor of La Presse, which publishes contemporary French poetry in translation. She is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Chet Wiener is the author of Devant l’abondance (P.O.L, 2003) and the chapbook WalkDontWalk (Potes and Poets, 1999). He co-edited, with Stacy Doris, the collection of translations: Christophe Tarkos; Ma Langue est Poétique (Roof Books, 2000), and his poems, translations and essays on translation have appeared in publications in the United States and France. He teaches translation theory and practice at San Francisco State University.