Rob Halpern is the author of several books of poetry including Rumored Place (Krupskaya), Disaster Suites (Palm Press), and most recently Music for Porn (Nightboat Books). Together with Taylor Brady he’s also the co-author of the book-length poem Snow Sensitive Skin (Displaced Press). His essays on things ranging from Baudelaire’s prose poems to New Narrative appear in various journals and anthologies, and he’s currently translating Georges Perec’s early writing on aesthetics and politics. A founding participant in the Nonsite Collective, Rob lives in San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Gail Scott is an experimental prose writer based in Montreal. The Canadian edition of The Obituary (Coach House), a finalist for the 2011 Grand prix du livre de Montréal (Montréal Book Prize), is a composition of fractalled voices and vectors on an urban site where every word has at least two meanings. Other novels are My Paris, about a sad diarist in conversation with Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin in contemporary Paris (Dalkey Archive, 2003), Main Brides and Heroine. Scott has also co-authored, with Nicole Brossard et al, la théorie, un dimanche, to appear in translation this year with Belladonna*; and edited the new narrative anthology Biting The Error, with Bob Gluck, Camille Roy, and Mary Berger. Her play Werther, Alive on the Radio, was performed by Poets Theatre in San Francisco in January. Scott’s translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was shortlisted for the Governor General’s award in translation [2001]. She is co-founder of the critical French-language journal Spirale (Montréal) and Tessera. She teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal