ANTHONY HECHT, born in New York City in 1923, was the author of eight books of poetry, including The Hard Hours, which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968. He also wrote several volumes of essays and criticism, among them The Hidden Law, a book-length study of the poetry of W. H. Auden. Appointed poet laureate of the United States in 1982, his other honors included the Ruth B. Lilly Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Eugenio Montale Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the National Medal of Arts. He received fellowships from the American Academy in Rome; the Bogliasco, Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations; and the National Endowment for the Arts. A member of the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he died in 2004.

PHILIP HOY is editor in chief of the Waywiser Press, which became Anthony Hecht's British publisher in 2002. He is the author of W. D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy (1998), Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (1999), Donald Justice in Conversation with Philip Hoy (2001), and M. Degas Steps Out: An Essay (2022). He wrote the foreword to Hecht's posthumously published Interior Skies: Late Poems from Liguria (2011) and is the editor of A Bountiful Harvest: The Correspondence of Anthony Hecht and William L. MacDonald (2018).