ko ko thett grew up in Burma. By the early 1990s, he was thoroughly poeticized and politicized at Rangoon Institute of Technology. In 1996 he published and clandestinely distributed two uncensored chapbooks on the campus. He left the country in 1997 following a brief detention for his role in the December 1996 student uprising in Rangoon. ko ko thett has written extensively for several Burma journals and leading papers in Finland.

James Byrne is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published by Flipped Eye in 2003. Blood / Sugar is his second collection. He is also the co-editor of Voice Recognition, an anthology of British and Irish poets under 35, and The Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees.