Edith Södergran - When she died in poverty at 31, Edith Södergran had been dismissed as a mad, megalomaniac aristocrat by most of her Finnish contemporaries. Today, she is regarded as Finland's greatest modern poet. Her poems - written in Swedish - are intensely visionary, and have been compared with Rimbaud's, yet they also show deep affinities with Russian poetry, with the work of Blok, Mayakovsky and Severyanin in particular. Born in 1892 of a Finno-Swedish family, Edith Södergran grew up in Raivola, a village on the Russian border, but was educated at a German school in St Petersburg. Her early influences were Goethe and Heine, and she first wrote in German. The driving force of Edith Södergran's mature Swedish poetry was her struggle with TB, which she contracted in 1908. For much of her short life, she was a semi-invalid in sanatoria in Finland and Switzerland. Her last years were spent amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and in desperate poverty in Raivola, where she died in 1923. Edith Södergran saw herself as an inspired free spirit of a new order, a disciple on her own terms of Nietzsche, then of the nature mystic Rudolf Steiner, and finally of Christ. But her voice is subtle and wholly original. It transcends the limits imposed by her illness to make lyrical statements about the violence and darkness of the modern world - imagistic poems that are alarming in the surreal beauty of their fragmentary diction.

Karen Solie (born 1966) is a Canadian poet. Born in Moose Jaw, Solie grew up on the family farm in southwest Saskatchewan. Over the years, she has worked as a farm hand, an espresso jerk, a groundskeeper, a newspaper reporter/photographer, an academic research assistant, and an English teacher. She currently resides in Toronto, Ontario.

Karen Solie's poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous North American journals, including Geist The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Event, Indiana Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Other Voices, and The Capilano Review. She has also had her poetry published in the anthologies Breathing Fire (1995), Hammer and Tongs (1999), and Introductions: Poets Present Poets (2001). One of her short stories was featured in The Journey Prize Anthology 12 (2000). Solie's poem "Prayers for the Sick" won 2nd place in ARC Magazine's 2008 Poem of the Year Contest.

Solie was one of the judges for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize, judged the 2012 Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a judge for the Poetry In Voice Canadian high school poetry recitation competition. In 2014, she was named as a trustee to The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.

Piotr Sommer is known in Poland both as an important poet and as a leading translator of English poetry into Polish. Born in 1948, he has published five collections of his own poems in Poland, as well as an antholgy of contemporary British poetry, and a book of interviews with British and Irish poets. He has translated Robert Lowell into Polish and produced Polish editions of Frank O'Hara and Charles Reznikoff.