Dan Veach won the Willis Barnstone Prize, America's most prestigious single-poem translation prize, for his rendering of "The Seafarer" included in this volume. He edited and helped translate the first book of poetry by Iraqis about the American invasion: Flowers of Flame (Michigan State University Press, 2008), winner of an Independent Publisher Book Award. Founding editor of the international poetry journal Atlanta Review, author of Elephant Water and Lunchboxes, Veach is an internationally celebrated poet who has performed his work from Oxford to Cairo, Singapore to Beijing. He studied Anglo-Saxon with William Alfred at Harvard.