Biographical note

IAN WILLIAMS is the author of seven books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He is the winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Raymound Souster Award, and a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Williams is a professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Creative Writing program. SARAH HOWE is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She held fellowships at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, and University College London before recently taking up a lectureship in poetry at King’s College London. Born in Kansas in 1979, BEN LERNER is the author of three books of poetry, The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Münster State Prize for International Poetry. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College. This is his first novel.