Diego Valeri (1887-1976) was an Italian poet, journalist, writer, critical scholar, and literary translator of French and German literature. During his life, he published 21 books of poetry (one post-humorously), five collections of travel essays, including the best-selling A Sentimental Guide to Venice, and Venetian Fantasies, various books of criticism, and literary translations from the German and French, including Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Stendhal’s The Red and The Black, poems by Goethe, and essays by LaFontaine. Diego Valeri is fondly remembered as ‘the poet of Venice’ for his love and dedication to the city in which he lived for almost all his life and that featured dominantly in his writing. The Diego Valeri Prize in Poetry is to this day a prestigious award in Italy, dedicated to the poet’s memory.

Laura Valeri is a literary translator and an award-winning author of three collections of short fiction and one collection of memoirs. Her translations and original writing appear most recently in Hunger Mountain, The Account, Griffell, Litro, The Antonym, The Bangalore Review, and (mac)ro(mic). Laura Valeri has an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University. She is the founding editor of Wraparound South, a literary journal, and she teaches in the undergraduate program at Georgia Southern University. She lives in Savannah, GA.