Gregory Rabassa (born 9 March 1922) is a literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English who currently teaches at Queens College.

Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York, U.S., into a family headed by a Cuban émigré. After serving during World War II as an OSS cryptographer and receiving a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth, Rabassa enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University, where he eventually earned a doctorate. He taught at Columbia for over two decades before accepting a position at Queens College.

He works primarily in Spanish and Portuguese. He has produced English-language versions of the works of several major Latin American novelists, including Julio Cortázar, Jorge Amado and Gabriel García Márquez. On the advice of Cortázar, García Márquez waited three years for Rabassa's schedule to become open so that he could translate One Hundred Years of Solitude. He later declared Rabassa's translation to be superior to his own Spanish original.

Rabassa had a particularly close and productive working relation with Cortázar, with whom he shared lifelong passions for jazz and wordplay. For his version of Cortázar's novel, Hopscotch, Rabassa split the inaugural U.S. National Book Award in category Translation.

Joaquim Aurélio Barreto Nabuco de Araújo (Recife, August 19, 1849 — Washington, D.C., January 17, 1910) was a Brazilian writer, statesman, and a leading voice in the abolitionist movement of his country.

Born in Brazil, Joaquim was the son of a major political figure in the Brazilian Empire, Jose Thomas Nabuco (1813–1878), a lifetime senator, counselor of state, and wealthy landowner. Jose made his move from conservativism to liberalism in the 1860s, establishing the Liberal Party in 1868 and supporting the reforms that would lead to the abolition of slavery in 1888. ("Joaquim Nabuco, Conservative Historian", Richard Graham, Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Summer, 1980), pp. 1–16)

Joaquim Nabuco spent most of his time from 1873 to 1878 traveling and living abroad. After returning to Brazil in 1878, Nabuco began his public fight against slavery through his political activity and in his writings. He campaigned against slavery in the Chamber of Deputies from 1878, and he founded the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society. In 1883, he wrote probably the most important work against slavery in the Portuguese language: O Abolicionismo. Although he was largely responsible for the abolition of slavery in 1888, contemporary affirmative action intellectuals believe his reasons for doing so were related to an elitist fear of slavery "Africanizing" Brazil. He is quoted as saying, "Free labor and slave labor cannot coexist, and neither can slavery and immigration". (Citation: Sales Augusto dos Santos, translated by Laurence Hallewell, "Historical Roots of the 'Whitening' of Brazil" in the journal Latin American Perspectives, 2002.) However, it is hard to explain, under this view, why Nabuco would want Africans to become free citizens when slave traffic had already been prohibited.

Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn (born 1949) is an American playwright, writer, poet, and multimedia performance artist.

Hagedorn was born in Manila to a Scots-Irish-French-Filipino mother and a Filipino-Spanish father with one Chinese ancestor. Moving to San Francisco in 1963, Hagedorn received her education at the American Conservatory Theater training program. To further pursue playwriting and music, she moved to New York in 1978.

Joseph Papp produced her first play Mango Tango in 1978. Hagedorn's other productions include Tenement Lover, Holy Food, and Teenytown. Her mixed media style often incorporates song, poetry, images, and spoken dialogue.

In 1985, 1986, and 1988, she received MacDowell Colony fellowships, which helped enable her to write the novel Dogeaters, which illuminates many different aspects of Filipino experience, focusing on the influence of America through radio, television, and movie theaters. She shows the complexities of the love-hate relationship many Filipinos in diaspora feel toward their past. After its publication in 1990, her novel earned a 1990 National Book Award nomination and an American Book Award. In 1998 La Jolla Playhouse produced a stage adaptation.