Eleni Vakalo (1921-2001) was a Greek poet, art critic, and art historian. She authored nine volumes of art history and art theory, and had regular columns of art criticism from 1955 to 1975 (with a two-year hiatus during the period of the junta’s strictest censorship); she also produced a radio broadcast of art criticism, and organized art-related teach-ins at factories. In 1958, she and her husband, the painter and stage designer Yiorgos Vakalo, founded the Vakalo School of Arts and Design, where she taught until 1990. Vakalo published fourteen books of poetry, and was intimately involved with the design and production of her early books. Indeed, Vakalo’s training as an art historian pushed her to initiate new poetic uses of the page, drawing on her knowledge of modern and contemporary art to rethink the role of the visual in the printed text. She received the State Poetry Prize in 1991, and the prestigious Academy of Athens Prize in 1997.

Karen Emmerich is a translator of eleven books of Modern Greek poetry and prose. Her recent translations include Christos Ikonomou’s Something Will Happen, You’ll See (Archipelago), Sofia Nikolaidou’s The Scapegoat (Melville House), and Amanda Michalopoulou’s Why I Killed My Best Friend (Open Letter). Her co-translation with Edmund Keeley of Yannis Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile (Archipelago) was awarded the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and her translation of Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris (Archipelago) was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.