Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was born in Bengal, the youngest son of a religious reformer and scholar. He wrote successfully in all literary genres and is the author of the national anthems for both India and Bangladesh. He participated in the Indian nationalist movement and was a devoted friend of Mahatma Gandhi. Tagore received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913; in 1915 he was knighted by the British Government, but later resigned the honor as a protest against British policies in India.

Tony K. Stewart is a Bengali language and area specialist whose research and teaching focus on the religious literatures of the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries. Trained at The University of Chicago, his research on the Hindu Vaisnava traditions of Bengal led him to specialize in the Brajabuli literary dialect of Bengali. Supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays program, the Ameican Institute of Indian Studies, and the American Instituteof Bangladesh Studies, he has worked extensively on the transcription and translation of unpublished handwritten Bengali manuscripts housed in Kolkata, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently Stewart is Professor of South Asia religions at North Carolina Center for South Asia Studies. He divides his time between Raleigh, Charleston, London, and Dhaka.

Chase Twichell was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1950. She is the author of five books of poetry, including The Snow Watcher (Ontario Review Press, 1998), The Ghost of Eden (Ontario Review Press, 1995), and Perdido (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991). She has won awards from the Artists Foundation (Boston), the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999, Twichell quit teaching (at Princeton University) to start Ausable Press, which publishes contemporary poetry. She lives in Keene, New York, with her husband, the novelist Russell Banks.