Erez Bitton was born to Moroccan parents in Oran, Algeria, in 1942, and emigrated to Israel in 1948. At the age of ten he was blinded by a stray bomb he found near his home in Lod, and spent the rest of his childhood in the Jewish Institute for the Blind. He received a B.A. in social work from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an M.A. in psychology from Bar Ilan University. He wrote a weekly column for the Israeli daily Ma'ariv and worked as a social worker and as a psychologist. His first two books, A Moroccan Offering and The Book of Na'na, published in 1976 and 1979 respectively, established him as the founding father of Sephardic poetry in Israel—the first poet to take on the conflict between North African immigrants and the Ashkenazi society, and the first to use Judeo-Arabic dialect in his poetry. He is the recipient of several literary awards, and the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Apyrion, which he founded in 1982. His two subsequent collections are: Timbisert, a Moroccan Bird (2009) and Blindfolded Landscapes (2013). Awards he has received include the Miriam Talpir Prize (1982), the Prime Minister's Prize (1988), the 2014 Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize, and the 2014 Bialik Prize for Poetry.
Tsipi Keller was born in Prague, raised in Israel, studied in Paris, and now lives in the US. Novelist, translator, and author of eleven books, she is the recipient of several literary awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction grants, and an Armand G. Erpf Translation Award from Columbia University. Her translations have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in the US and Europe, as well as in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization (Yale University Press, 2012). Her most recent translation collection, Futureman, a volume of selected poems by the late David Avidan, was published by Phoneme Media in 2017.
