Ronya Othmann is an author, poet, and journalist whose work deals with themes of migration, homeland, and war. She has earned numerous awards, including the Leonhard and Ida Wolf Memorial Prize of the City of Munich and the MDR Literature Prize.

Gary Schmidt, chair and professor of German at Coastal Carolina University, is the author of The Nazi Abduction of Ganymede: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Postwar German Literature, cotranslator of What Makes a Man: Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin, and coeditor of Quertext: An Anthology of Queer Voices from German-Speaking Europe.