Brenda Hillman and Sebastião Edson Macedo met in the apartment of the Argentine poet Alejandro Crotto when he was visiting Berkeley in spring 2013. From there, Macedo became Hillman’s Portuguese tutor—but the student-teacher relationship did not last very long. As Macedo describes it, in helping Brenda review the nuances of Portuguese grammar, he became impressed by how rich and full of poetry her insights were into the language. Their collaboration thus quickly evolved into a translation project: They began working together on the poems Hillman and her mother (a native speaker of Portuguese) had translated by the Brazilian writer Ana Cristina Cesar. They worked together on Cesar’s collection A Teus Pés (At Your Feet) for years, before finalizing the manuscript with Katrina Dodson for Free Verse Editions in 2018.

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