Stephanie McCarter and Jia Tolentino

Stephanie McCarter is a professor of classics at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses for Penguin Classics and is poised to be the first female translator of the epic into English verse. She is the author of Horace Between Freedom and Slavery: Horace’s First Book of Epistles, and her verse translation of Horace’s Epodes, Odes, and Carmen Saeculare was published in 2020.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror. Raised in Texas, she studied at the University of Virginia before serving in Kyrgyzstan in the Peace Corps and receiving her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. She was a contributing editor at The Hairpin and the deputy editor at Jezebel, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Grantland, Pitchfork, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.