Julia Hartwig is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the recipient of numerous awards from Poland, France, and the United States, including the Jurzykowski Prize and the Austrian Georg Traki Prize for poetry. Author of fourteen volumes of poetry and several prose works, she occupies a prominent place in the Polish literary landscape. In Praise of the Unfinished: Selected Poems, the first English translation of her work, was published in 2008. She lives in Warsaw. John Carpenter is a poet and literary critic. He is the author of Creating the World and a study of the literature of the Second World War. Among the works the Carpenters have translated as a team are seven volumes of poetry and prose by Zbigniew Herbert. Bogdana Carpenter is professor of Slavic languages and literature and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Poetic Avant-Garde in Poland, 1918-1939 and Monumenta Polonica: The First Four Centuries of Polish Poetry, as well as other works.