Robert Lax (1915-2000) published dozens of volumes of poetry and prose journals with small presses in Europe and the United States, as well as A Catch of Anti-Letters, correspondence with his lifelong friend Thomas Merton. Educated at Columbia University, he worked as an editor for The New Yorker, Jubilee, and PAX. From 1962 to the end of his life, he made his home in the Greek islands, first Kalymnos and ultimately Patmos.

John Beer is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lived on the Greek island of Patmos for two years in the late 1990s, where he served as literary assistant to Robert Lax. He currently teaches creative writing at Portland State University; previously, he reviewed theater for Time Out Chicago.