contributors

Alexander Dickow is a poet, literary scholar, and translator. He is the author of Appetites (2018) and has translated works by Henri Droguet, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and others.

Balam Rodrigo (Villa Comaltitlán, Soconusco, Chiapas, 1974) is a former footballer, biologist, and writer. An author of over thirty books of poetry, his lyrics give life to a diversity of topics, ranging from football to the biological sciences, to humankind’s spiritual relationship with God. Recent works: Marabunta (Invisible Books, 2017; Praxis, 2018; Yaugurú, 2018; Los Perros Románticos, 2019), Central American Book of the Dead (FCE, 2018), Antiicaro (La Chifurnia, 2019), Cantar del ángel con remos en la espalda (Puertabierta Editores, 2019) and Icarias (Icaro Ediciones, 2020). His work has earned several recognitions, to include: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Literature Contest 2012, Jaime Sabines International Poetry Prize 2014, José Emilio Pacheco National Poetry Prize 2016, Amado Nervo National Poetry Prize 2017 and Aguascalientes Poetry Fine Arts Award 2018. Member of the National System of Art Creators of Mexico from 2014-2016 and 2018-2020.

Emily Sun is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Barnard College in New York City. Her new book is titled On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China (Fordham University Press, 2021).

Gustave Roud (1897–1976) was a major Swiss poet and photographer whose neoromantic poetic prose influenced a generation of poets including Maurice Chappaz and Philippe Jaccottet. His works include Ecrits (1950) and Campagne perdue (1972). He also translated German writers including Rilke, Hölderlin and Novalis.

Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Finalist for the National Translation Award. She organized and introduced a May 2021 dossier dedicated to Rodríguez in the digital magazine Latin American Literature Today. Previously she translated numerous poetry editions, such as books by Juan Carlos Flores, Marcelo Morales, Tina Escaja, Rodríguez, and others. Her most recent scholarly chapters examine contemporary poetry by Daniel Borzutzky (US) and Soleida Ríos (Cuba). Selections from Dykstra’s own current poetry manuscript appear in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, Seedings, Clade Song, The Hopper, La Noria (with translation to Spanish by Escaja), and Acrobata (with translations to Portuguese by Floriano Martins). Her essay “Ensenada,” co-translated with Juan Manuel Tabío, appeared in Rialta in September 2021.

Manoranjan Byapari was born in the early-1950s in Barishal, Bangladesh. His family migrated to West Bengal in India when he was three. They were resettled in Bankura at the Shiromanipur refugee camp. They were subsequently forced to shift to the Ghola Doltala refugee camp, in 24 Parganas, and lived there till 1969. However, Byapari had to leave home at the age of fourteen to do odd jobs. In his early twenties, he came into contact with the Naxals, and he landed up in jail after that, where he taught himself to read and write. Subsequently he joined the famous labour activist Shankar Guha Niyogi, founder of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha at the Dalli Rajhara Mines, who were leading a struggle to reclaim Adivasi lands from the feudal lords who had appropriated them. Later, while working as a rickshaw-puller in Kolkata, Byapari had a chance encounter in 1981 with the renowned Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, who urged him to write for her journal Bartika. He has published twelve novels and over seventy short stories since. Some of his important works include Ittibrite Chandal Jibon (an autobiography), Amanushik, the Chandal Jibon trilogy of novels, Anya Bhubon and Motua Ek Mukti Senar Naam. Until 2018, he worked as a cook at the Helen Keller Institute for the Deaf and Blind in West Bengal. Byapari's first major recognition came in 2014, when he received the Suprabha Majumdar Prize, awarded by the Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, for Ittibrite Chandal Jibon. In 2018, Interrogating My Chandal Life, the English translation of this autobiography by Sipra Mukherjee, was awarded the Hindu Prize for non-fiction. He is currently the chairman of the Dalit Sahitya Akademi in Bengal and was elected to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in 2021. 

Michael Willis (Fremont, California, USA, 1983) has lived and worked in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Brazil and Uruguay. He received a master’s degree from the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., where he developed his passion for the challenges of migration, particularly as they are represented in poetic form and in translation. At Georgetown, Willis translated Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead and Marabunta. Michael is a married father of three and is currently serving as a US military attaché in Montevideo.

Reina María Rodríguez is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose. She is a current Finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Among other awards too numerous to list in full, Rodríguez holds two Casas de las Américas Awards for Poetry (1984, 1998), the Alejo Carpentier Medal for Cuban literature (2002), Cuba’s 2013 National Prize for Literature, and the 2014 Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Award for Poetry. France named her Chevalier in its Order of Arts and Letters in 1999. Her recent books include Achicar (U. Autónoma de Querétero, 2021), Luciérnagas (U. Autónoma de Querétero, 2017), El piano (Bokeh, 2016), Prosas de La Habana: Variedades de Galiano (U. de Valparaíso, 2015), and The Winter Garden Photograph / La foto del invernadero (bilingual; Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). The Princeton University Library holds her papers.

Sean T. Reynolds is a literary scholar, poet, and translator living in Chicago, Illinois. His critical work on poetic translation has appeared in Postmodern Culture, Journal of Modern Literature, and Postmedieval. With David Hadbawnik he edited Jack Spicer's Translations of Beowulf, which won the 2016 Howell D. Chickering Prize in Translation. 

Sergio Chejfec is an Argentine writer of narrative and essays who lives in New York City. He teaches at NYU in the Creative Writing in Spanish MFA Program. He has published several books, including novels, essays, and short stories. Some of them have been translated Into English: Notes toward a Pamphlet, Ugly Duckling Presse, New York, 2020; The Incompletes, Open Letter, Rochester, 2019; Baroni, A Journey, Almost Island, New Delhi, 2017; The Dark, Open Letter, 2013; The Planets, 2012; My Two Worlds, Open Letter, 2011.

V. Ramaswamy translates Bengali voices from the margins. He is best known for his long-term engagement with the anti-establishment writer, Subimal Misra, with The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories, and This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels. The final Misra volume, The Earth Quakes, is under publication. Ramaswamy's translation of The Runaway Boy, the first novel in the Chandal Jibon trilogy by Manoranjan Byapari, was published in 2020. The Nemesis, the second part of the trilogy, will be published in 2022. He was awarded the first Literature Across Frontiers – Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in creative writing and translation in 2016 to translate the Chandal Jibon novels. Ramaswamy's translations of Memories of Arrival: A Voice from the Margins, by Adhir BIswas, and Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas, by Shahidul Zahir (of Bangladesh), are also forthcoming in 2022.

Whitney DeVos is a writer and translator living in Mexico City, where she is completing a doctoral dissertation on documentary and investigative poetics in the Americas. Her translations have appeared in the Acentos Review and are forthcoming in the Chicago Review.