Claude McKay (1889-1948), born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the United States in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1928, he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon gold medal for literature. He also published two other novels, Banjo and Banana Bottom; a collection of short stories, Gingertown; two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a work of nonfiction, Harlem: Negro Metropolis. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, and in 1977 he was named the national poet of Jamaica. In 2009, his lost manuscript for the 1930s novel Amiable with Big Teeth was discovered among the archived papers of Samuel Roth at Columbia University, and it was published for the first time in 2017 by Penguin Classics. Romance in Marseille was published in 2020 by Penguin Classics.

Brent Hayes Edwards (introduction) is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. In 2023 he co-wrote Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, an autobiography of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, which won a 2024 American Book Award. Edwards was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2020. His other books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism and Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination.