"Mani Rao is the author of eight poetry books and a critically acclaimed translation of the Bhagavad Gita as a modern poem. Her poems and essays have been published in a number of international journals and anthologies and translated into several languages. She has an MFA in creative writing and is currently a PhD student of Religious Studies at Duke University."
"Kalidasa(circa fourth century CE) is widely regarded as the greatest poet and dramatist in the Sanskrit language. Not much is known with certainty about his life and though many are aware of his timeless Sakuntalam and Meghadutam, very few have actually read him, even in translation. The aesthetics of poetry may have changed over 1500 years - we no longer compare women's faces to lotuses or their figures to vines - but it is difficult not to be moved by the sheer beauty and lyricism of Kalidasa's description of the exiled yakṣa beseeching a cloud to carry his message across the mountains to his lover, or his evocative narration of the meeting of doomed lovers in the forest."
