Patrick Donnelly

Patrick Donnelly is the author of Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012), and The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press). He is an associate editor of Poetry International, and director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place.

Stephen Miller

Stephen D. Miller is associate professor of Japanese language and literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is author of The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013), which includes co-translations of 141 Japanese poems with Patrick Donnelly.

Jōtōmon-in

Jōtōmon-in (988 - 1074), also known as Fujiwara no Shōshi, Empress Shōshi, or Akiko, was Empress of Japan from c. 1000 - c. 1011. Among Shōshi's ladies-in-waiting was Muraskai Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji. In 1026, at the age of 39, Shōshi became a Buddhist nun, assuming the name Jōtōmon-in. The Japanese original of her poem is a waka, the thirty-one syllable form that was primary in Japanese poetics for over a millenium.