Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979) was a playwright, short-story writer, poet, and essayist who became famous for his work as well as for his highly bohemian lifestyle. While he lived in Havana for much of his life, he moved to Argentina in the 1950s, where he befriended Jorge Luis Borges, the exiled Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, and others and wrote for the prestigious literary magazine Sur. He returned to Cuba after the success of the revolution in 1959 but was subsequently jailed in 1961 for "political and moral crimes." He lived in relative obscurity from that point forward. He died in Havana.

Mark Schafer is a literary translator, a visual artist, and a senior lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he teaches Spanish. He has translated works by authors from around the Spanish-speaking world, including Gloria Gervitz, David Huerta, Belén Gopegui, and Alberto Ruy Sánchez. Schafer is a founding member of the Boston Area Literary Translators Group.