Gavin Flood is Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion and Academic Director of the Centre for Hindu Studies at Oxford University. He is the author of An Introduction to Hinduism; The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory, and Tradition; and The Tantric Body: The Secret Tradition of Hindu Religion. Charles Martin was born in New York City in 1942. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The recipient of numerous awards, Martin has received the Bess Hokin Prize, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Three of his poetry collections--Steal the Bacon (1987), What the Darkness Proposes (1996), and Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems (2002)--have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

His translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses won the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.