Howard Moss was poetry editor of the New Yorker for almost forty years. He also wrote more than a dozen books of poetry, plays, criticism, and a book of arch parody-microbiographies of cultural figures, Instant Lives, illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Damion Searls is the author of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going (stories) and has written for Harper’s, Bookforum, n+1, and The Believer. As a translator—of authors including Marcel Proust (On Reading)—he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.