"You" and "The Rain's Colors"

Saltanat Qaiser was born in Lahore, Punjab province, Pakistan. She completed her Master of Arts in Urdu Literature and Language degree at University of the Punjab, Lahore. Her first collection of Urdu ghazals was titled “Ik Chiragh Behta hua” (The Flowing Lamp) and was published in 1997 from Lahore, Pakistan. She is inspired by the poetry of classical Urdu poets Mirza Asadullah Ghalib, Meer Taqi Meer, contemporary Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, classical Punjabi poet Bulleh Shah, and contemporary Punjabi poetess Amrita Pritam. The complete text of her Urdu ghazals is available free of charge on well-known Urdu websites like Rekhta and Dareechah-e-Nigarish.

Talat Afroze was born in Lahore, Pakistan (1959), graduated with a Masters degree in Biological Sciences from Quaid e Azam University, Islamabad and completed his PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA before returning to Pakistan. He emigrated to Canada with his wife and children. He started writing poems in English, Punjabi, and Urdu during his college years in Lahore. He published a collection of his Punjabi and Urdu poems, songs, and some ghazals titled “Ojhal Cheezain” from Toronto in 2013. He runs a literary website (Dareechah) that showcases excerpts from modern Urdu and Punjabi poetry and has several currently active social media accounts dedicated to popularizing modern Urdu and Punjabi poetry.