Born in Mexico City in 1951, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez is an award-winning writer and editor whose works have been translated into many languages. He is best known for a quintet of novels, which take place in the Moroccan city of Mogador and explore the nature of desire: Los nombres del aire (1987), En los labios del agua (1996), Los jardines secretos de Mogador (2001), Nueve veces el asombro (2005), and La mano del fuego (2007). Two of these have been previously published in English, most recently The Secret Gardens of Mogador.

Rhonda Dahl Buchanan is a Professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Louisville. In 2006 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship to translate Alberto Ruy-Sánchez’s novel Los jardines secretos de Mogador: voces de la tierra. Her translation, The Entre Ríos Trilogy: Three Novels by the Argentine writer Perla Suez was published in 2006 by The University of New Mexico Press in their Jewish Latin America Series. In 2008, White Pine Press published her translation, Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction, a bilingual illustrated anthology of short short stories by the Argentine writer Ana María Shua, followed by The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth in 2009.