Gaspar Orozco was born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1971. He was a member of the punk rock band Revolución X in the 1990s and codirector of the 2011 documentary film Subterraneans: Mexican Norteña Music in New York. His books of poetry include Abrir fuego (Mexico City: Tierra Adentro, 2000), El silencio de lo que cae (Mexico City: Programa Editorial de la Coordinación de Humanidades, UNAM, 2000), Notas del país de Z (bilingual, translation by Mark Weiss) (Chihuahua: Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, 2009), Astrodiario (El Paso: Bagatela, 2010), Autocinema (Mexico City: Conacul¬ta 2010), Plegarias a la Reina Mosca (Monterrey: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2011), and, in collaboration with the artist Jairus, Game of Mir¬rors, an interactive e-book with English and Chinese translations. His work is featured in several poetry anthologies and has been published in literary publications in Mexico, the United States and the United Kingdom. He has translated poetry from English, French and classical Chinese into Spanish. A career diplomat, he has served in New York, and at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles, as Consul for Community Affairs. He lives currently in New York.

Mark Weiss has published nine books of poetry, most recently As Luck Would Have It (Shearsman Books, 2015) and Dark Season (Least Weasel, 2011). Thir¬ty-Two Short Poems for Bill Bronk, Plus One appeared as an ebook in 2013 (http://www.argotistonline.co.uk). He edited, with Harry Polkinhorn, Across the Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California (Junction, 2002). Among his other translations are Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer (Junction, 2006), Cuaderno de San Antonio / The San Antonio Notebook, by Javier Manríquez (Editorial Praxis, 2004), and the ebook La isla en peso/ The Whole Island, by Virgilio Piñera (www.shearsman.com, 2010). His bilingual anthology The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry was published in 2009 by the Uni¬versity of California Press. He lives at the edge of Manhattan’s only forest.