Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003) played a pivotal role not only in Brazilian and Latin American culture, but also in the avant-garde at large. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Campos was barely in his twenties when he founded the concrete poetry movement alongside his brother Augusto de Campos and their friend Décio Pignatari, thus revolutionizing poetry and placing Brazil on the map of literary experimentalism for the first time. Over the years, his writing evolved in different directions, including the experimental prose of Galáxias. Parallel to his creative efforts, Campos republished long-forgotten poets, such as the Romantic Joaquim de Sousândrade and the modernist Oswald de Andrade. With Augusto and Décio, he translated modernist and world literature including Joyce, Mayakovski, Pound, medieval troubadours, Dante, Chinese classical poetry, Japanese Noh plays, Goethe, Mallarmé, Biblical texts, and Homer, among others. Campos produced a complex oeuvre of extreme global and temporal breadth gathered in more than 30 single-authored and collaborative volumes. He was admired by international figures such as Octavio Paz, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Roman Jakobson, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Derrida. Campos received numerous prestigious distinctions, including the Jabuti Prize (Brazil), the Octavio Paz Prize (México), the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France), the Prix Roger Caillois (France), and an honorary doctorate from Université de Montréal (Canada).

Odile Cisneros is a poetry scholar and translator with interests in Latin American avant-gardes, contemporary Brazilian poetry, concrete poetry, ecopoetics, and literary translation. She coedited Novas: Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos and has translated the work of Jaroslav Seifert, Régis Bonvicino, and Sérgio Medeiros, among others. Her translations were included in the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. She created and manages the website ecopoesia.com. Her work has been funded by Mexico’s Conaculta, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and Centro de Referência Haroldo de Campos-Casa das Rosas. She teaches at the University of Alberta and in 2020 she was visiting professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil.

The translator of over 40 books of major Latin American writers of the 20th century, Suzanne Jill Levine‘s critical works include Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (FSG) and The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.  A Guggenheim Fellow, her many national and international honors include a lifetime achievement award from PEN. Her rendition of Julio Cortázar’s All Fire the Fire has recently been reissued by New Directions, and her latest is Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories for Seven Stories Press.  She is Professor Emerita (UCSB) and lives in Santa Barbara.

Charles A. Perrone is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies at the University of Florida. In retirement he lives in Santa Cruz, CA, where he pursues creative writing (mostly lyric), reviews world literature, and continues to translate, principally poetry. His latest single-author book of criticism was Brazil, Lyric, and the Americas. In the 1980s he attended the seminars of Haroldo de Campos at the University of Texas.

Christopher Middleton (1926–2015), born in Cornwall, England, was a poet and translator, especially of German literature. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and held academic positions at the University of Zürich and King’s College London before becoming Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He translated Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann, receiving the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translation. His Collected Poems appeared in 2008 from Carcanet.