Adrienne Rich received the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951 (from judge W. H. Auden), at the age of 21, and with strength and conviction has not stopped writing since in her distinct voice. Rich has said that her poetry seeks to create a dialectical relationship between "the personal, or lyric voice, and the so-called political--really, the voice of the individual speaking not just to herself, or to a beloved friend, but to and from a collective, a social realm."

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit in 1950 and is the author of four books of poetry including The Country Between Us which commemorates two years spent working with human rights advocates in El Salvador containing some of the most powerful poems of political violence and political commitment ever written in the United States, and The Angel of History. In 1993 she compiled and edited Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, a large volume that assembles the work of nearly 150 poets, all marked in some direct way by a century's wars or devastations. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is a memoir, The Horse on Our Balcony. Forché is director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.