Tomaz Salamun was born in 1941 in Zagreb, but grew up in Koper, a coastal town in Slovenia south of Trieste. In 1966 he graduated in Art History from Ljubljana University. Salamun, who won the Preseren Prize in 2000, was the leading figure of the Slovenian poetic avant-garde in the 1960s and in the 1970s. In early 1970s he spent two years at Iowa on the International Writing Programme, and he has lived on and off in the USA since then. In 1996 he became Slovenian Cultural Attache in New York. He has published 45 volumes of poetry in Slovenian. His work has also been translated into twenty different languages, numbering over 80 volumes, and he has been included in many anthologies. He was a former Fulbright Fellow at the Columbia University in New York and visiting professor at the Universities of Alabama, Massachusetts, Pittsburgh, Richmond and Texas (The Michener Center for Writers in Austin). Salamun has also been in residence at DAAD Berlin, Bogliasco, Cite des Arts Paris,...