Safaa Fathy was born in Egypt. She is a poet, essay writer, and filmmaker. She is the author of Al Haschische (Pamenar Press, 2023), an experimental book of poems. Her plays Terror and Ordeal (Lansman, 2004) were prefaced by Jacques Derrida, with whom she signed the book Tourner les mots (partly translated into English by Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania). Her book of poetry, Revolution Goes Through Walls (SplitLevel Texts), was first published in Egypt, then in France and Brazil. She also experiments with the visual texture of poems in filmic forms. She participated in the 47th Annual Poetry Project Marathon with a short piece entitled "I Would Like to Say." Safaa Fathy's Name to the Sea, a film-poem structured within a still frame, is being published along with the text in seven languages (Vanilla planifolia, Mexico City). She has been writing a novel in English for the past five years.

Rawad Z. Wehbe is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations where he studies Arabic literature. His research explores early Islamic poetry in Arabic at the intersection of emotion, form, and time. Rawad earned two MA degrees in Arabic from the University of Texas at Austin (2017) and the University of California, Los Angeles (2013). He was awarded a fellowship for the Center of Arabic Study Abroad (2014) in Amman, Jordan. Rawad received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Dissertation Abroad Request (2021), Janet Lee Stevens Award in Arabic and Islamic Studies (2020), and was named a Mellon Graduate Fellow (2019). He was also nominated for the Texas Foreign Language Teaching Excellence Award (2017). He is a contributing translator to Home: New Arabic Poems (Two Lines Press, 2020). His translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, READ, Doublespeak, and Words Without Borders.