Acclaimed for her best-selling translations of Cervantes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Edith Grossman (1936—2023) received many awards including the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. Billy Collins was the Poet Laureate of the United States and the State of New York. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College and a Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute. A Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and author of many collections of poetry, including Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds and Horoscopes for the Dead, he lives in Westchester, New York.

"A well-chosen selection... Edith Grossman's translations are impressive acts of ventriloquism, preserving the distinctively Renaissance tone of the verse." London Review of Books"