Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. Nominated twelve times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he did not begin writing full-time until he was nearly 50 years old, having worked secretarial and administrative jobs for the majority of his life. A hugely popular public speaker and intellectual figure during his day, Valéry is now best known for his intellectual diary, the Cahiers, and his poetry, which influenced contemporaries and later luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, John Ashbery, and James Merrill.

Charlotte Mandell is a French literary translator of more than 40 books, including Jean Genet's The Criminal Child (NYRB Classics; co-translated with Jeffrey Zuckerman) and André Breton and Philippe Soupault's The Magnetic Fields (NYRB Poets). In April 2021 she received the honor of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the poet Robert Kelly.

Ryan Ruby is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel and a book-length poem, Context Collapse. His essays and reviews have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, The Nation, Poetry, and New Left Review, among other publications. He lives in Berlin.