Andrea Bajani was born in Rome in 1975. He is the author of many award-winning novels, including If You Kept a Record of Sins and The Book of Homes. The Anniversary received Italy's highest literary award, the Strega Prize, in 2025 and will be published in more than thirty countries. Bajani teaches creative writing at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Geoffrey Brock is author of three collections of poetry, editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and translator of numerous books of poetry, prose, and comics, most recently Giuseppe Ungaretti's Allegria, which received the National Translation Award in Poetry. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Cullman Center. He teaches at the University of Arkansas, where he is the founding editor of The Arkansas International.