Michael Schmidt OBE FRSL is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow, where he is also convenor of the Creative Writing M Litt Programme. He is a founder and the Editorial and Managing Director of Carcanet Press and founder and general Editor of PN Review. He has published several collections of poems, two novels, a number of anthologies and volumes of literary history, and two books of translations. Robert Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941 and now live in Berkeley. He is the author of five volumes of poetry. The most recent, Times and Materials, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. John Matthias was born in Colombus, Ohio, in 1941 and now lives in Cambridge in the UK. His work has been translated into several European languages. James McMichael was born in Pasadena in 1939. He teaches at the University of California. His most recent book, Capacity, was shortlisted for the 2006 National Book Award. JOHN PECK was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1941. After living for many years in Zurich, where he trained as an analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute, he is now in private practice in Vermont. He was awarded the Prix de Rome for The Broken Blockhouse Wall (Carcanet, 1979). In 1999 Carcanet published his Collected Shorter Poems 1966-1996. Robert Pinsky was born in 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. He is a former poet laureate of the United States and has appeared as himself in the animated sitcom The Simpsons.