Harry Mathewswas born in New York City in 1930 and spent his adult life in the United States and in France, where he co-founded the influential journalLocus Soluswith John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler in 1961. He was the first American member of the literary consortium Oulipo, alongside Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec. His many writings, spanning novels, short fiction, poems, essays, and translations from the French, includeThe Conversions, Tlooth, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, Cigarettes, The Journalist, My Life in CIA, and The Solitary Twin. Mathews was honored by the French government as an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters and earned awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts. He died in Key West, Florida, in 2017. Nicholas Delbanco received his BA from Harvard and his MA from Columbia University. He is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he directed the MFA program in creative writing and the Hopwood Awards.An editor and author of more than twenty books, Delbanco has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

His most recent books are Still Life at Eighty, a memoir, and Reprise: The Collected Stories.