Eduards Aivars’ real name is Aivars Eipurs; he was born in Latvia in 1956, and studied Latvian Language and Literature at the Latvian State University. He has been published seven collections of poetry since 1985, with Es pagāju (I Passed) receiving in 2002 the Poetry Award. It was regarded as marginal at first, but turned out to be a forerunner of the nineties; he has come closest to deconstruction. AInava kliedz (The Landscape Cries) is considered most significant, having influenced a generation of poets. His poetry has been translated into Lithuanian, Hungarian, Russian, Finnish, Ukrainian, Spanish and English.
Translator Inara Cedrins is an American artist, writer and translator who received her B.A. in Writing from Columbia College in Chicago and her M.A. in Arts Administration at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Her anthology of contemporary Latvian poetry written while Latvia was under Soviet occupation was published by the University of Iowa Press, and she is currently working on a new Baltic anthology.

Inara went to the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing in 1998 to study traditional Chinese ink painting on silk, remaining five years to teach at universities including Tsinghua University and Peking University, as well as to the People's Liberation Army and students at the Central Academy of Fine Art, designing the courses and using poetry as a vehicle. Two collections of her poetry were published bilingually by the Foreign Literature Press in Beijing.

In 2003 she went to Nepal to study the technique of thangka painting. After the king’s coup d’etat, she relocated to Riga, where she started a literary agency called The Baltic Edge and taught Creative Writing at the University of Latvia. She returned to America in 2006, and a collection of her poetry titled Fugitive Connections was published by the Virtual Artists Collective. She currently lives in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area.