Ken Knaus came into contact with the Tibet issue as a CIA case officer who was allocated to work with Gyato Thondup, the Dalai Lama's elther brother, on the Tibet issue at the UN in 1959. He was in charge of political training for the Tibetan recruits at Camp Hale, Colorado until 1962. He was Chief of the Tibet Task Force from 1962 to 1965, when he was based in New Delhi. After retirement he became a leading historian of American policies concerning Tibet, and published an acclaimed history of the CIA's Tibet operations, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival in 1999. He is currently completing a major history of US policies concerning Tibet.

Andrew Clark translated a new collection of poems Tibet's True Heart, which had been written over 20 years by Woeser, Tibet's most well-known writer and commentator. These poems were first published at the worst time during the 50 years of crackdown in Tibet, when hundreds of Tibetans had 'disappeared' or had been silenced following a wave of protests against Chinese rule that swept the plateau from March onwards. Despite living under almost constant police surveillance in Beijing together with her husband, Chinese writer Wang Lixiong, Woeser continues to be one of the most eloquent and fiercest critics of Chinese oppression in Tibet. This book reveals the discovery of her Tibetan Buddhist identity and her country's past after an upbringing in elite Party circles speaking Chinese. Her writings are reflections on life, memory, loss and spiritual faith as well as forbidden subjects such as political imprisonment and injustice.

Wu Fengshi (Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is an expert on NGOs in China and particularly on transnational advocacy networks in international affairs, the environmental movement in China, and health politics. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, where she's working on a project on the Relevance of International Non-Government Organizations in China.