Alireza Korangy has been Assistant Professor of Classical Persian and Contemporary Iranian Linguistics at the University of Virginia and has taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2007 and is currently the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Persian Literature and acting president of Societas Philologica Persica. His recent books include Development of the Ghazal and Khaqani's Contribution: A Study of the Development of Ghazal and a Literary Exegesis of a 12th c. Poetic Harbinger (2013) and an edited volume, Essays in Islamic Philology, History, and Philosophy (2016). Hanadi Al-Samman is an associate professor of Arabic Language and Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women's Writings (2015) and has published in the Journal of Arabic Literature; Women's Studies International Forum; and Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. She is co-editor of "Queer Affects" a special issue of the International Journal of Middle East Studies.Michael C. Beard is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies at the University of North Dakota. He is co-editor of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures and is editor for the monograph series Middle East Literature in Translation. He publishes frequently on Arabic and Persian literatures, as well as translating works of literature. He has won the Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work.