Michel Albert is the author of eight collections of verse, in addition to having produced the only comprehensive translation of Irving Layton’s poetry and prose into French, Layton, l’essentiel, in 2001. His affinity with English language Canadian and American poets is stronger than that of most Quebec poets, leading him to collaborate with Canadians George Bowering and David McFadden on a book of baseball poems, Poèmes et autres baseballs, in 1999. His own work is plain-spoken, and hews close to the working-class realities of his own life, far from the Quebec literary whirl. For twenty years he worked as a grip on Montreal film sets. New Shoes on Scorched Earth is his seventh collection, published in French in 2000, and concerns itself with the death of his father when he was a young man, and his experiences as a single father in the wake of a failed relationship. Ekstasis Editions is pleased to introduce him to an English language readership.

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Donald Winkler was born in Winnipeg, graduated from the University of Manitoba, and did graduate study at the Yale School of Drama. From 1967 to 1995 he was a film director and writer at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, and since the 1980s, a translator of Quebec literature. In 1994, 2011, and 2013 he won the Governor General Award for French to English translation, and has been a finalist for the prize on three other occasions. His translation of Samuel Archibald's short story collection, "Arvida," was a finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize. He lives in Montreal, Quebec.

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