Merit Kabugo is the head of the department of linguistics, English language studies, and communication skills at Makerere University. He is a Luganda-English translator and editor, a job he has done since 1995. He specializes in legal, medical, and literary translations. 

Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, scholar, and translator, and an associate professor at NYU. He has published two collections of poetry and four novels, and his works have been translated to twelve languages. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence, won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. His translation of his own novel, The Corpse Washer, won the 2014 Saif Ghobash Prize for Literary Translation and was longlisted for the International Prize for Foreign Fiction. He has published op-eds in the Guardian, the New York Times, and various Arab publications. His novel The Book of Collateral Damage is forthcoming in English from Yale University Press in 2018.

Amir Ahmadi Arian is an Iranian novelist and journalist. He has written two critically acclaimed novels and a book of nonfiction in Farsi. In English, his short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Guernica, Witness magazine, Lithub, Asymptote, Massachusetts Review, and more. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Queensland, Australia, and an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at City College in New York.

Mary Ann Newman translates fiction (Quim Monzó), poetry (Josep Carner), and essay (Xavier Rubert de Ventós) from Catalan and Spanish. She is cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee and in 2017 she won the NACS Award for Outstanding Scholarship and the J.B. Cendrós Award (Òmnium Cultural) for her translation of Private Life by Josep Ma. de Sagarra.