Blaine Marchand was born in 1949 in Ottawa, Ontario.

He is a Canadian writer and poet. A longtime program manager with the Canadian International Development Agency, some of his writing has been inspired by his international travels with the organization. In 2012, he was guest editor of an issue of the Canadian poetry magazine Vallum dedicated to poets from Pakistan. From 1992 to 1994, he was president of the League of Canadian Poets. He was also a co-founder of the Ottawa Independent Writers, the Ottawa Valley Book Festival and the Canadian Review, and a regular columnist for Ottawa's LGBT newspaper Capital Xtra!. He received several awards, e.g., Georgia May Cook Sonnet Award (1971), Anthos Poetry Prize (1987) and Archibald Lampman Award (1992). Marchand published many collections of poems, e.g., "After the Fact" (1979), "Bodily Presence" (1994) and "The Craving of Knives" (2009) and a novel, "African Journey" (1990).

Openly gay, he lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Alessandro Marchetti was born in Pontorno, Tuscany, and from an early age showed signs of poetic talent. Sent by his family to Florence to study law, he went instead to Pisa to study philosophy and science under Borelli. Marchetti was later named to the chairs of logic (1658) and philosophy (1659) at Pisa, where he taught with unprecedented independance, without reference to the authority of Aristotle. In 1679 he succeeded Borelli in the chair of mathematics. He wrote on mathematics and physics. His Italian translations of classical literature, particularly of Lucretius' De Rerum natura published in London in 1717 are considered models of precision and elegance.