Naowarat Phongpaiboon studied law at Thammasat University and graduated in 1965. Naowarat won the Southeast Asian Write Award in 1980 for his collection of poems Mere Movement and was named Thailand’s National Artist in 1993. He studied with Buddhadhasa Bhikkhu and is respected for the Buddhist content of his poetry.

John T. Mattioli is working on his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches History and Civilization Studies at the Madison Area Technical College. His new dissertation title is Poetry of Rice and Bread: An Inquiry into the Pastoral Mode and an East/West Poetics. His Thai translations come out of research conducted under the Thailand Research Fund’s Senior Researcher’s Program on Spiritual and Intellectual Force in Contemporary Thai Poetry and a Fulbright IIE research grant at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. He loves science-fiction, motorcycles, pick-up trucks, making snow-forts and sand-castles, and teaching literature and ideas to undergraduates.