contributors

Anna Deeny Morales is a US-based Latina writer who grew up between Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. She works in poetry and music as a librettist, translator, and literary critic. Her operas have been supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Georgetown Americas Institute, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Recent works include Las Místicas de México, an immersive performance dedicated to the more than 110,000 disappeared in Mexico. Created in collaboration with Timothy Nelson, Maribeth Diggle, Tina Chancey, Marta Pérez García, and Emily Baltzer, Místicas debuted in March, 2024 with the IN Series and the Children’s Chorus of Washington at the Dupont Circle Underground and the Mexican Cultural Institute. Commissioned by the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, ZAVALA-ZAVALA: an opera in v cuts, with music by composer, Brian Arreola, made its world debut at the Kennedy Center in 2022 with the IN Series and the Georgetown University Orchestra. ZAVALA-ZAVALA was performed at Gala Hispanic Theater, Washington, DC, in June, 2024. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for her translation of Tala by Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral, Deeny Morales has translated works by Raúl Zurita, Mercedes Roffé, and Alejandra Pizarnik, among others. Forthcoming works in translation include Ecopoems, Storm, & Some Fringe Benefits, a volume of selected works by Nicanor Parra, which she has edited and translated for New Directions; and Amanda Berenguer's Identity of Certain Fruits, which will be published by Point Zero Press. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley; an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College; and a BA in English Literature, with a minor in Piano Performance, from Shepherd University. A Fellow in the Humanities at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University, her monograph on Latin American and US poetry, Other Solitudes: Essays on Consciousness and Poetry, is forthcoming in 2025.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's recent books are Book of Rahim & Other Poems (Literary Activism/Westland India and Shearsman Books UK) and a translation of Vinod Kumar Shukla's poems Treasurer of Piggy Banks (Literary Activism/Westland India and Circumference Books US).

Chandu Maheriya is a prominent Dalit writer, intellectual, editor, activist, journalist and well-regarded columnist based in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. During his association with cause-based organizations like Bhimrao Vidyarthi Sangh and Adhikar between 2001 to 2013, Maheriya organized a number of public events around Ambedkar’s thought, Dalit issues and Dalit literature. As an editor of reputed fortnightly Dalit Adhikar, Maheriya became instrumental in positioning Dalit issues on the frontline of political discourse in Gujarat. He has written more than a thousand opinion pieces and columns in popular newspapers like Sandesh and Divya Bhaskar as well as magazines like Naya Marg, Bhumiputra, Jalaso, Aarapar, Samaj Mitra, Dalit Shakti and so on. Among his books, Sambarada thi Swaman Nagar (a history and socio-political critique of Dalit forced migration in Gujarat), Dr. Ambedkar (a book on Dr. Ambedkar’s philosophy), Pran Prashn Pani no (a book on water crisis and experiments in conservation), Chotaraf (a book on the exposition and critique of issues of current relevance) Asmita (edited Dalit poetry), Visfot (edited Dalit poetry), Madi Mane Sambhare re (Collection of Dalit essays on the figure of mother) are read with great relish in Gujarat even today. He has presided over several conferences organized by Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, Gnana Satra and different universities.  

Daniela Catrileo is a Mapuche poet and teaches philosophy in Santiago. She is a founder of the Mapuche art collective Rangiñtulewfü dedicated to critical works on feminism, racism and decolonization. She is the author of four poetry collections, a short story collection and a novel. The poems included in this selection come from the book “El territorio del viaje” (The Journey’s territory), published by Archipielago ediciones in 2017. It discusses the subtle rituals and transformations that are set in motion once the speaker must return from the city to the native land, considering not only the cultural tension experienced but the political tension with the nation state. 

Dr. Hemang Ashwinkumar is a bilingual poet, fiction writer, translator, editor and critic who writes in Gujarati and English. His works have been translated into Greek, Italian and other Indian languages. His English translations include Poetic Refractions (2012), an anthology of contemporary Gujarati poetry, and Thirsty Fish and Other Stories (2013), an anthology of select stories by eminent Gujarati writer Sundaram. Penguin Random House, India has brought out his translation of Gujarati Dalit writer Dalpat Chauhan’s novel Vultures (2022), and edited collection of short stories titled Fear and Other Stories (2023). His Gujarati translations of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), Sarpa Satra (2021) and Jejuri (2024) have been critically acclaimed. His scholarly monograph Translating the Translated: Poetics and Politics of Literary Translation in India and English translation of eminent painter-poet Gulammohammed Sheikh’s collection of autobiographical essays Gher Jatan (On the Way Home) will be published by Orient Blackswan and Seagull Books respectively in 2024.Alvin Pang, PhD, is an internationally active poet and editor based in Singapore. His writing has been translated into more than twenty languages worldwide, including Croatian, Swedish, Chinese, French and Macedonian. Anthologised in the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018), he is the author of several volumes of poetry, including the prose poetry chapbook Uninterrupted Time (2019). Diaphanous, a collaboration with George Szirtes, is forthcoming in 2023. (www.alvinpang.com).

László Krasznaorkai is the author of several books including Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, and Seiobo There Below. His most recent work translated into English is A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East . He is a winner of the Man Booker International Prize.

Maribel Mora Curriao is in charge of the Diversity and inclusion program in Universidad de Chile and is part of the council to the Unesco lecture on Higher Learning and Indigenous People. She is a Mapuche poet that has represented her nation in international poetry festivals and other cultural instances. The selection of poems translated here belong to her second poetry collection titled “Las ciudades innombrables” (The Unnameable Cities) published on 2024 by Andesground ediciones. The speaker of these poems confronts the city as it were a place of permanent exile for generations.

Rodrigo Rojas, is a Chilean poet and translator. He is a graduate from NYU’s MfA where he worked with Philip Levine, Derek Walcott, Sharon Olds and Elizabeth Alexander, among other poets. He is the author of two books of essays and four poetry collections, the latest is “Estrella de la mañana” (Garceta ediciones, 2016). His translations into English are available in Barbaric, Vast & Wild (Black Widow Press, 2015); and in journals in the United States, Mexico, South Africa, Peru, Spain and Chile. As a contributing editor to Rattapallax Magazine, from 2003 to 2009, he constantly published poets from South America in translation. He is currently  collaborating with visual artists in creative projects and curatorship. Among these projects is the Mapuche artist Francisco Huichaqueo who explores pottery shattering and the language of dreams as a creative practice of resistance. He is also part of the art collective Setebos that develops a transdisciplinary creative practice across Patagonia, and part of the faculty in the Creative Writing program at Diego Portales University, Santiago. 

Yeny Díaz Wenten is a middle school Spanish Language teacher. The natural elements in her poetry are as alive as her syntax, and both conform a distinct landscape of the mestizo experience, the culturally hybrid identity that resides in a political interstice. The poems selected come from her fourth book poetry, “Quejido, canto y arrullo” (Moan, song and hum) published by Garceta ediciones in 2024. These are poems written in layers of oral tradition, musical experience and memory.