Afzal al-Din Badil b. Ali b. Osman, commonly known with his pen name Khaqani (d. between 1187 and 1199), a poet of medieval Shirvan in present-day Azerbaijan, was in perpetual conflict with his rulers and patrons. He transformed the figure of the poet into an agent of political critique through his innovative qasidas (odes). He is perhaps best known for his prison poems, including the Christian Qasida. Alongside his numerous qasidas and ghazals (lyrics) he authored one of the first travelogues in Persian verse, The Gift from Two Iraqs (Tuhfat al-Iraqayn), which chronicles his pilgrimage to Mecca, undertaken without the consent of his ruler.

Kayvan Tahmasebian is a poet, translator, literary critic, and the author of Isfahan’s Mold (2016) and Lecture on Fear and Other Poems (2019). His poetry was a finalist for the Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts in 2017. With Rebecca Ruth Gould, he is co-translator of High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi (The Operating System, 2019).

Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the poetry collection Cityscapes (2019) and the award-winning monograph Writers & Rebels (2016). She has translated many books from Persian and Georgian, including After Tomorrow the Days Disappear (2016) and, with Kayvan Tahmasebian, High Tide of the Eyes (2019). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was awarded the Creative Writing New Zealand Flash Fiction Competition prize in 2019.