Linda Gregerson is the author of four collections of poetry and two volumes of criticism. Her second poetry collection, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize and The Poets Prize; her third, Waterborne, won the 2003 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; her fourth, Magnetic North, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. Her numerous essays on lyric poetry and Renaissance literature appear in leading journals and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic. Gregerson's many honors include awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the Modern Poetry Association, and the International Spenser Society, and grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan.

Nicholas Delbanco has published twenty-four books of fiction and non-fiction. His most recent novels are The Count of Concord and Spring and Fall; his most recent works of non-fiction are The Countess of Stanlein Restored, The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life, and Lastingness: The Art of Old Age, published by Grand Central Publishing in January 2011. As editor he has compiled the work of, among others, John Gardner and Bernard Malamud. Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature, and Chair of the Hopwood Committee, he has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards, received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, twice, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship. Last year Professor Delbanco completed a teaching text for McGraw-Hill entitled Literature: Craft and Voice, a three-volume Introduction to Literature of which he is the co-editor with Alan Cheuse; in 2004 he published The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation.