Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) published his debut novel, Boys Alive, in 1955. It was hailed as a masterpiece by prominent Italian writers and condemned as pornographic by Marxist critics and the conservative judiciary of Milan. In the decades that followed, he published many more novels, books of poetry, essays, and plays. He also became a screenwriter and filmmaker, collaborating with Federico Fellini on Le Notti di Cabiria and La Dolce Vita and directing films such as The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, The Hawks and the Sparrows, and Theorem, which Pasolini had first published as a novel earlier the same year. A figure of controversy due to his antiestablishment political views and homosexuality, he was brought to trial at least thirty-three times. He was brutally murdered under mysterious circumstances on the beach in Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome.

Ann Goldstein is an editor and translator from the Italian language. Best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, she has also translated works by Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, Donatella Di Pietrantonio, and Alba de Céspedes, among others.

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of two collections of poetry, The Promised Land: Poems from an Itinerant Life and High Desert, as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature. He has translated works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdellatif Laâbi, Rachid Boudjedra, Ribka Sibhatu and Fabio Franzin. He is Assistant Professor of English, French and Italian at the University of California, Davis, where he also teaches on the MFA Program in Creative Writing.