Blaise Ndala is a Canadian writer originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His debut novel, J'irai danser sur la tombe de Senghor, won the Ottawa Book Award for French fiction and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. His book Sans capote ni kalachnikov won the 2019 Combat des livres and was a finalist for the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire and the Trillium Book Award. In the Belly of the Congo is his first book to appear in English.

Amy B. Reid is an award-winning translator and Professor of French and Gender Studies at New College of Florida. In 2016 she received a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for Patrice Nganang's When the Plums Are Ripe. Her other translations include Patrice Nganang's Dog Days, Mount Pleasant, and A Trail of Crab Tracks, Mutt-Lon's The Blunder, and Véronique Tadjo's Queen Pokou.