writers
Adi Shankara
To the Teacher’s Wooden Sandals
(Poetry / Winter 2017)
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Adi Shankara (Shankaracharya), the great 8th-century Indian philosopher of Advaita Vedanta, was also a poet. A striking body of vivid spiritual poetry is attributed to him by tradition.
Eve Adler
(Translator) Almost Island Acknowledgements and Preface to the English Edition by Mikhail Epstein
(Prose / Monsoon 2007)
(Translator) Two Everyday Sects: Foodniks and Domesticans
by Mikhail Epstein (Prose / Monsoon 2007)
(Translator) Two Doomsday Sects: Steppies and Sinnerists
by Mikhail Epstein (Prose / Monsoon 2007)
(Translator) Fragments of an Auto-commentary
by Mikhail Epstein (Prose / Monsoon 2007)
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Eve Adler (1945 – 2004) was an American classicist who taught at Middlebury College for 25 years, a graduate of Queens College and Brandeis University.
David Albahari
A Writer Without Words: Six Short Short Stories
(Prose / Monsoon 2020)
(Translated from thr Serbian by Ellen Elias-Bursac)
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David Albahari was born in Serbia where he now lives. He lived for many years in Canada. He has published thirteen books of short stories, fifteen novels, six books of essays, a book of three short plays, and two books for children, many of which have been translated into other languages. Of these, two collections of his short stories, Words Are Something Else and Learning Cyrillic, have appeared in English, as well as the novels Tsing, Bait, Snow Man, Globetrotter, Götz and Meyer, Leeches, and Checkpoint
Meena Alexander
from Quickly Changing River
(Poetry / Winter 2009)
New Poems
(Poetry / Winter 2009)
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Meena Alexander's books of poetry include Illiterate Heart which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk and the recently published Quickly Changing River. She is the author of the memoir Fault Lines. Her reflections on poetry, migration and memory Poetics of Dislocation is forthcoming in 2009 from the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series. Currently she is working on a cycle of poems based on drawings made by children from Darfur, in the aftermath of violence. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
Kazim Ali
Prodigal
(Poetry / Monsoon 2013)
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Kazim Ali is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator. His books include four volumes of poetry, The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, the mixed genre Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities and Sky Ward. He has published two novels Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth, two collections of essays, Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice as well as translations of poetry by Sohrab Sepehri and a novel by Marguerite Duras. Recently he edited the essay collection Jean Valentine: This-World Company. In addition to being associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College and founding editor of Nightboat Books he is a certified Jivamukti Yoga instructor.
Haruki Amanuma
from Water Cat: Chapters 1, 2 & 3
Translated from the Japanese by Mariko Nagai
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Haruki Amanuma (1953 - ), a German scholar by training, is a novelist as well as a premier scholar of zepplin in Japan. He is the author of several experimental and lyrical novels for adults, as well as numerous books about history of flying for children. Currently the vice-president of the Japan Grimms' Association as well as the chair of the Japanese Children's Books Association, he is working on translation of Andersen's tales as well as the sequel to Water Cat. This novel, of which we include the first three chapters are included in our issue, was the recipient of the prestigious 1998 Japan Children Books Award.
S. Anand
from Finding My Way
(Prose / Monsoon 2016)
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S. Anand is the publisher of Navayana. Working with the artist Venkat Raman Singh Shyam on the book Finding My Way over the course of four years, helped awaken the poet, writer and musician in him that had lain dead for nearly twenty years. He has since found himself often amidst words and music.
Alison Anderson
(Translator) The Interview by Christian Bobin
(Prose / Monsoon 2010)
(Translator) Promised Land by Christian Bobin
(Prose / Monsoon 2010)
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Alison Anderson is the author of the novels Darwin's Wink and Hidden Latitudes. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for her translations of four short works by Christian Bobin in 2004. She lives in a small village in French-speaking Switzerland.
Bohdan Ihor Antonych
A Concert from Mercury
Translated from the Ukrainian by Steve Komarnyckyj
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Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-37) took the folklore language and traditions of the Lemke region, which was part of Poland between the first and second world wars, and transplanted them into literary Ukrainian. He was born in the village of Novytsia where his father was a parish priest and took a Slavic studies degree at Lviv university. He worked as an editor to finance his literary career and died of pneumonia having produced a remarkable volume of poetry in a short lifetime. The ecstatic tone and dazzling imagery of his poetry seem effortless. However Ukraine's occupation led to the neglect of this author who arguably surpasses any of his East European contemporaries in terms of the quality, scope and humanity of his work.
Reshma Aquil
Five Poems
(Poetry / Winter 2016)
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Reshma Aquil (1955–2012) was born in Allahabad, India. She was educated at St. Mary's Convent and later, at the University of Allahabad, where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. She went on to teach in the Department of English there, specialising in 19th century literature. Her first book of poetry, Sleeping Wind was published by Ethos in 2001. Later volumes were Shadows of Fire and The Unblending. Her poems have appeared in Poetry India: Voices of Many Worlds (British Council Division and the Poetry Society, India), Chandrabhaga, Kavya Bharti, Hudson Review, Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry (The Poets' Printery, South Africa), Softblow, and The Literary Review.
Sascha Aurora Akhtar
(Translator) Belles Lettres by Hijab Imtiaz Ali
(Prose/Winter 2017)
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Sascha Aurora Akhtar has been a figure on the UK/USA ‘avant-garde,’ poetry scene for over a decade. She is the author of two poetry collections The Grimoire of Grimalkin (Salt) and 199 Japanese Names for Japanese Trees (Shearsman). Her work has been widely anthologised and translated into Armenian, Portuguese, Galician, Russian, Dutch and Polish. Anthologies include Cathecism: Poems for Pussy Riot (2012) and Out of Everywhere (Reality Street, 2015). She has also been part of poetry protests – Against Rape (Peony Moon, 2014), Solidarity Park Poetry – Poems for the Turkish Resistance (Ed. 2013). Her story ‘The Nature of Wounds‘ appeared in STORGY in 2017. Women: Poetry: Migration, an anthology (Theenk Books: Edited by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa) is upcoming in 2018 with poems from A Year In Clouds.
Thérèse Bachand
(Translator) from Beyond the Wall by Régis Bonvicino
(Poetry / Spring 2017)
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Long involved in the experimental literary scene in Los Angeles, Thérèse Bachand’s first collection, Luce a Cavallo received Green Integer’s Gertrude Stein Book Award for 2005. Her unpublished work includes a project using the daily newspaper as a means to create a common palette of words.
Andre Bagoo
from Pitch Lake
(Poetry / Winter 2016)
All Streets Lead to the Sea
(Poems / Monsoon 2012)
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Andre Bagoo is a Trinidadian poet and writer. His second book of poems, BURN, was published by Shearsman Books and longlisted for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His poetry has appeared or is due at Boston Review, Blackbox Manifold, Caribbean Review of Books, Cincinnati Review, Moko, Poetry Review (UK), St Petersburg Review and elsewhere. His third book, Pitch Lake, is forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press in 2017.
Aditya Bahl
After Muktibodh
(Poetry / Winter 2018)
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Aditya Bahl is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, including Name Amen published by Timglaset (Malmo). Excerpts from this engagement with Muktibodh have appeared in Social Text Review and Datableed. He is currently enrolled in the PhD program at Johns Hopkins University.
Sohini Basak
If You Look Long Enough
(Poetry / Monsoon 2018)
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Sohini Basak grew up in Barrackpore, India. She studied literature and creative writing at the universities of Delhi, Warwick, and East Anglia, where she was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury continuation grant for poetry. She also writes fiction, some of which has appeared in journals such as 3:AM Magazine, Aainanagar, Ambit, Litro, Out of Print, and Visual Verse. We Live in the Newness of Small Differences (Eyewear Publishing, 2018) is her first collection of poetry. It was awarded the inaugural Beverly Series manuscript prize.
Bernard Bate
Bharati Style and the Tamil National Popular
(Special Issue: Style / Winter 2012)
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Bernard Bate is the author of Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India (OUP India, 2011). He is currently working on a genealogy of vernacular political oratory and the formation of the modern Tamil world.
Bei Dao
Poems
(Poetry/Monsoon 2009)
Translated from the Chinese by Eliot Weinberger
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Bei Dao was born in 1949. He spent eleven years working as a construction labourer. He is one of China's most significant poets, and has lived in exile since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His work has been widely translated into English. His books in translation include The August Sleepwalker (1990), Old Snow (1991), Forms of Distance (1994), Landscape Over Zero (1996), and Unlock (2000). He is one of the founder editors of the literature journal Jintian, begun in 1978. Jintian published a new literature which expressed the importance of the imagination and of individual perception, long suppressed in the Chinese context. It was banned in 1980, and was later revived by Bei Dao in exile, and he continues to edit it today. He currently lives in Hong Kong.
Mirza Athar Baig
I Was Healed in a Plaster Shell
(Prose/Winter 2017)
Translated from the Urdu by Haidar Shahbaz
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Mirza Athar Baig is a philosophy professor at one of the oldest colleges in Pakistan, is the author of three novels, a short story collection, and numerous plays for television.
Shubro Bandopadhyay
from Buddhist Inscriptions
(Poetry/Monsoon 2018)
Translated from the Bengali by Souradeep Roy
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Subhro Bandopadhyay (b. 1978, Calcutta, India) is the author of four books of poetry in Bengali, one of which fetched him Indian national award for young writers in 2013 (Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar), and two were translated into Spanish and published in Spain. A Bengali biographer of Pablo Neruda, he has received the Antonio Machado International Poetry Fellowship from the Government of Spain, which allowed him to participate in the residency programme under the same name in Soria, Spain and Poetas de otros mundos distinction from Fondo poético internacional, Spain. He also participated in a residency programme in Aberystwyth, Wales, as a part of Poetry Connections India-Wales organized by Literature Across Frontiers and the British Council, and he has been invited to distinguished literary festivals including the Medellin International Poetry Festival, Colombia and Expoesía, Spain, and Jaipur Literature Festival, India.
Abul Bashr
My Sleepwalking Mother
(Prose/Winter 2017)
Translated from the Bengali by Epsita Halder
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Abul Bashar (b. 1951) is a major contemporary Bengali prose writer who has authored more than forty books. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Bankim Puraskar and the Ananda Puraskar. Hailing from the complex socio-religious terrain of district Murshidabad in West Bengal, Bashar creates a new paradigm of storytelling about local Muslim communities that live precariously on the borders of the state, pushed to the margins by the aggressive forces of religion and masculinity. Bashar's writings emerge from the conflict between scripture and ritual, masculine and feminine, state policy and human lives, and explore without sentimentality the conflict within.
Diana Bellessi
Have You Measured the Time of Your Heart?
(Poetry/Winter 2019)
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny Morales
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Diana Bellessi was born in Zavalla, Argentina, in 1946, and lives in Buenos Aires. She is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Bellessi studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, and from 1969 to 1975 she travelled by foot throughout the American continent. This journey, along with her country’s Dirty Wars that lasted from 1976–1983, deeply inform her work. For various years, Bellessi gave poetry workshops in prisons throughout Buenos Aires. Her numerous volumes of poetry include Destino y propagaciones (1972); Crucero ecuatorial (1980); Tributo del mudo (1982); Danzante de doble máscara (1985); Eroica (1988); Buena travesía buena ventura pequeña Uli (1991); El Jardín (1992); Crucero Ecuatorial. Tributo del Mudo (1994); The Twins, the Dream (with Ursula K. Le Guin) (1996); Sur (1998); Gemelas del sueño (with U.K. Le Guin) (1998); Mate cocido (2002); La Edad Dorada (2003); La rebelión del Instante (2005); Variaciones de la luz (2006); and Tener lo que se tiene: Poesía reunida (2009). She has translated works by Ursula K. Le Guin, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, and Olga Broumas, among others.
Bellessi was a founding member of Revista Feminaria and participated on its editorial board; she was on the editorial board of Diario de Poesía; and a founding member of the publishing cooperative, Nusud. She has received various awards, including a 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry; the Antorchas Foundation Fellowship in 1996; the Konex Prize, Quinquenio 1999–2003, for her achievements in poetry in 2004; the Argentine National Prize in Poetry in 2007; and, again, the Konex Prize, Quinquenio 2009–2013, for her achievements in poetry in 2014.
Amanda Berenguer
The Identity of Certain Fruits
(Poetry/Winter 2017)
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny Morales
Four Poems
(Poetry, Winter 2012)
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny Morales)
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Amanda Berenguer (1921-2010) was one of the most important and prolific Uruguayan writers of the last century. Like many contemporaries who lived through several dictatorships, Berenguer’s poetry often represents language and meaning under siege at the same time that she attempts to maintain its political efficacy. However, The Identity of Certain Fruits breaks this pattern by engaging the possibility of meaning through a deep sense of pleasure in the things that surround us and the language that speaks to those things. In this case, those things are fruit, and what Berenguer represents is their sensual audacity.
Erik Bergqvist
Is Not Wind
(Poetry/Winter 2017)
Translated from the Swedish by the author and Vivek Narayanan
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Erik Bergqvist (b. 1970, Karlstad, southern Sweden) is the author of six collections of poetry in Swedish and has also been a critic writing on literature and music in the Swedish press for some twenty years. In 2015, he won the Gustaf Fröding Society poetry prize. Bergqvist has translated Simon Armitage, René Char, Mai Van Phan and others into Swedish; Virvlarna (“Whirlpools”), a large collection of his essays, fragments and occasional pieces, appeared in 2017. He is also a keen amateur lepidopterist and is one half of the pop/electronica duo Schaum.
Bhuvneshwar
Copper Worms
(Play/Monsoon 2013)
Translated from the Hindi by Rahul Soni)
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Bhuvneshwar was born in 1910 in Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh, and died, in abject poverty and mostly forgotten, in 1958 on a railway platform in Lucknow. A protégé of Premchand’s, who published many of his stories and plays in the journal Hans, Bhuvneshwar also wrote criticism and poetry (in both Hindi and English). He published only one book in his lifetime - a collection of one-act plays, Caravan. Highly regarded among Hindi writers but not well known otherwise, he is credited with bringing modernism and experimentation to Hindi literature. His short stories are now regarded as precursors to the Nai Kahani movement, and his most famous work, the play Taambe ke Keede, predating Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by some months, is regarded by many as the “world’s first absurdist play”. His collected works, Bhuvneshwar Samagra, edited by Doodhnath Singh, were published on his hundredth birth anniversary, finally bringing this important writer back into print.
Ellen Elias-Bursac
(Translator) A Writer Without Words David Albahari
(Prose/Monsoon 2020)
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Ellen Elias-Bursać translates fiction and non-fiction from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. Her translation of David Albahari's novel Götz and Meyer was given the 2006 American Literary Translators Association National Translation Award. She is the president of the American Literary Translators Association.
Michael Biggins
(Translator) Six Poems by Tomasz Salamu
(Poetry/Winter 2011)
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Michael Biggins's book-length translations of works by Slovene poet Tomaž Šalamun and novelist Vladimir Bartol, Drago Jančar and Boris Pahor have been published by Harcourt, Northewestern University Press and others. He curates the Slavic and East European library collections and teaches Slavic languages, both at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Sven Birkerts
Pensees
(Prose/Monsoon 2008)
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Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the “electronic culture” He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, and Amherst College and most recently at Mount Holyoke College. Birkerts is the Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the editor of AGNI, the literary journal. His other books are Reading Life: Books for the Ages, Readings, and a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades.
Christian Bobin
Promised Land
(Prose/Monsoon 2010)
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson
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Christian Bobin is the author of more than forty short works, including The Very Lowly: A Meditation on Francis of Assisi. He lives in Le Creusot, France.
Régis Bonvoncino
From Beyond the Wall
(Poetry/Spring 2017)
Translated from the Portuguese by Therese Bachand, Maria do Carmo Zanini and Odile Cisneros
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Régis Bonvicino (São Paulo, 1955) is a Brazilian poet, translator, literary critic and editor. He has published over twelve collections of poetry in his own country, as well as anthologies, and poetry for children. He is the editor of Sibila. In English, his work has appeared in Sky-Eclipse: Selected Poems (Green Integer, 2000), and Beyond the Wall: New Selected Poems (Green Integer, 2016).
Paul Bowles
(Translator) The Proof by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
The Truth by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
(Prose/Monsoon 2007)
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Paul Bowles was an American composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life. His novels include The Sheltering Sky, Let it Come Down and Up Above the World among others. He wrote short stories and poetry and translated many writers from the Spanish, Portuguese and French.
Jane Brodie
(Translator) Donaldson Park by Sergio Chejfec
(Essay/Spring 2017)
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Jane Brodie is a visual artist and translator specialising in the visual arts. She moved to Buenos Aires after graduating from college in 1990. It was not until she had lived in that city for almost fifteen years that she understood what kept her there: the combination of elegance and decay so particular to that city. That combination is also, to a large extent, what her art investigates. Her translation clients include Art Forum, Malba, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Hammer Museum, and other institutions, publications, and individuals (mostly artists and critics) based in the Americas.
Mark S. Burrows
(Translator) Psalms by SAID
(Poetry/Monsoon 2013)
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Mark S. Burrows is currently professor of theology and literature at the University of Applied Sciences, Bochum (Germany). He previously taught, for twenty-five years, history and aesthetics in several graduate theological schools in the US. He has lectured widely in the United States, Australia, Asia, and Europe. He currently serves as Poetry Editor of the journal Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, and has published his own poems and translation, most recently, in Poetry, 91st Meridian, Presence, and Eremos. He recently published a new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems, Prayers of a Young Poet (Paraclete Press, 2013), and the poems that appear here are to be published in their entirety as 99 Psalms by the Iranian-German poet SAID (Paraclete Press, forthcoming in September, 2013). He is currently a writer-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute, where he is the recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship for Translation.
Stephen Burt
Growing Up
(Special Issue: Style/Winter 2012)
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Stephen Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. His books include The Art of the Sonnet, with David Mikics; Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry; and Parallel Play. A new book of poems, Belmont, will appear from Graywolf Press in 2013.
Manoranjan Byapari
Cooking Up a Tale
Translated from Bangal by V. Ramaswamy
(Prose/Winter 2021)
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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 autobiographt), 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.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
From Madeleine is Sleeping
(Prose/Monsoon 2007)
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Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s first novel, Madeleine Is Sleeping, was nominated for a National Book Award. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tin House, The Georgia Review, and Best American Short Stories. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA fellowship, she lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at the University of California, San Diego.
Vahni Capildeo
Too Solid Flesh
(Prose / Monsoon 2010)
from Dark and Unaccustomed Words
(Poetry / Winter 2009)
from Undraining Sea
(Poetry / Winter 2009)
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Vahni Capildeo (b. Trinidad, 1973; currently UK-based) works in both poetry and prose. Her most recent poetry collection, Undraining Sea (Egg Box, 2009), explores both forms. A forthcoming book, Dark and Unaccustomed Words, is partly inspired by her time with the Etymology Group at the Oxford English Dictionary. Capildeo has held a Research Fellowship in the Arts at Girton College, Cambridge and a Writing Fellowship at the University of Leeds. While her roles include work as a Contributing Advisor for Black Box Manifold (University of Sheffield) and Contributing Editor for the Caribbean Review of Books Capildeo is also proud to have volunteered for Oxfam Head Office and Oxford Rape Crisis. She has just been appointed to a part-time Lectureship in Creative Writing at the University of Kingston (Greater London).
Margaret Carson
(Translator) from Baroni: A Journey
by Sergio Chejfec
(Prose / Monsoon 2016)
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Margaret Carson translates fiction, poetry, essays and drama from the Spanish. Her translations include Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds (Open Letter, 2011), Mercedes Roffé’s Theory of Colors (belladonna* books, 2005) and José Tomás de Cuéllar's The Magic Lantern(Oxford University Press, 2000). Other translations have appeared in Asymptote, Aufgabe, EOAGH, e-misférica, BOMB, Music and Literature and Words Without Borders. She is currently translating the dream journal and other writings by the Spanish surrealist artist Remedios Varo (Wakefield Press, forthcoming). A former cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee, she teaches at City University of New York, Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Nick Carter
(Translator) The Self That Writes
by Claudio Magris
(Essay / Monsoon 2008)
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Nick Carter is a translator from the Italian
Valerie Mejer Caso
Twelve Poems (Which Prologue a Flood)
(Poetry / Spring 2017)
from Without Republic
(Poetry / Monsoon 2016)
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Valerie Mejer Caso (Mexico City, 1966) comes from a family of immigrants from Spain, Germany and England. Mejer Caso has been the recipient of the International Poetry Award “Gerardo Diego” (Spain) for her book De Elefante a Elefante and was also the recipient of three grants given by The National Council for Culture and the Arts in Mexico. Her work has been widely translated into English, and has appeared in Poetry London, The Hunger Mountain Review, Nimrod, The American Poetry Review, Translations, Asymptote and Circumference among others. She’s the author of Cuaderno de Edimburgo and de la ola el atajo (Amargord, Colección Trasatlántica, España); Geografías de Niebla (Tucán de Virginia, 2007, México); Esta Novela Azul (Tucán de Virginia 2005, México); Ante el ojo del cíclope (Tierra Adentro, 2000, México). In 2015, Action Books published a bilingual version, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero of This Blue Novel, with an introduction by Raúl Zurita. The collection of poems Rain of the Future was also published by Action Books, in 2014, and was edited by C.D. Wright, with translations by her, Forrest Gander and Alexandra Zellman Döring.
Nguyen Quoc Chanh
Poems
(Poetry / Monsoon 2008)
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Nguyen Quoc Chanh was born in Bạc Liêu in 1958 and lives in Saigon. The backbone of the underground literary scene in Vietnam, a fearless critic of the government, he is the author of four collections of poems, Đêm mặt trời mọc [Night of the Rising Sun] (1990), Khí hậu đồ vật [Inanimate Weather] (1997), e-book Của căn cước ẩn dụ [Coded Personal Info] (2001) and samizdat Ê, tao đây [Hey, I'm Here] (2005). His poems have been translated into English by Linh Dinh and published in the journals The Literary Review and Filling Station, and in Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue (Palgrave 2001). Along with Phan Nhiên Hạo and Văn Cầm Hải, he's featured in Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), also translated by Linh Dinh. From the introduction to that book: Chanh's first collection, Đêm mặt trời mọc, came out in 1990 and was greeted by a degree of hostility almost comic in its intensity. In an article titled "An Unhealthy Book," the newspaper The People began by complaining of the "somewhat murky and entirely irrational title." Then it evoked Chanh's poem "Prometheus" to predict that both the poet's life and career will perish in a flame he's "toying with." In 2005, he gave a reading with Linh Dinh at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt, as part of its Southeast Asian arts festival.
Sampurna Chattarji
(Translator) from The Ashen Sun by Joy Goswami
(Poetry / Monsoon 2008)
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Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, fiction writer and translator. Her translation of Joy Goswami's Surjo-Pora Chhai (The Ashen Sun) is forthcoming. Her books include Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray (translation, Penguin, 2004). The Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy of Letters) published her debut poetry collection Sight May Strike You Blind in 2007 and her first novel is forthcoming from HarperCollins.
Sergio Chejfec
The Character
Translated from the Spanish by Whitney DeVos
(Poetry / Winter 2021)
Donaldson Park
(Prose / Spring 2017)
from Baroni: A Journey
(Prose / Monsoon 2016)
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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.
Batsirai Chigama
Excess Love
(Poetry / Monsoon 2021)
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Batsirai Chigama is a performer, poet, literary activist, and social commentator. City of Asylum described her work as “surprising, shocking, and skillfully deliberate work,” and “a breath-taking embodiment of grief.” Chigama’s debut collection, Gather The Children won Outstanding First Creative Published Book at the National Arts Merit Awards in 2019. In the same year she was an honorary fellow at the International Writing Programme (IWP) at Iowa University. Her work with young people, has taken her as far as Denmark and the USA, performing and facilitating creative writing and spoken word workshops in schools.
Dilip Chitre
(Translator) Nine Poems by Namdeo Dhasal
(Poetry / Monsoon 2008)
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Dilip Chitre (1938-2009) was a bilingual poet who wrote in Marathi and English. His Ekun Kavita or Collected Poems appeared in three volumes in the 1990’s. As is Whre Is is a selection of his poems in English translation. Travelling in a Cage is a book of his English poems. Chitre was also a translator of Tukaram and Dnyaneswar.
Odile Cisneros
(Translator) From Beyond the Wall by Regis Bonvoncino
(Poetry/Spring 2017)
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Odile Cisneros has translated poetry by Jaroslav Seifert, Vetezslav Nezval, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Régis Bonvicino, and Haroldo de Campos among others. She is an associated professor of Arts, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
Daniel Clutton
((Translator) from The Messenger’s Letter by Sun Ganlu
(Prose/Monsoon 2010)
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Daniel Clutton is a translator and editor for the Contemporary Writers from Shanghai Series, published by Better Link Press, Shanghai Press & Publishing Development Co.
Andrew E. Colarusso
Three Poems from Hivado
(Poetry/Monsoon 2018)
_____
Andrew E. Colarusso is the author of The Sovereign (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017) and Creance (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2018).
Peter Cole
The Invention of Influence: Part One
The Invention of Influence: Part Two
Okay, Koufonissi
(Poetry/Monsoon 2013)
_____
American poet Peter Cole’s most recent volume of poems is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled; a new collection, The Invention of Influence, is forthcoming (both from New Directions). His translations include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale). Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.
Maxime Coton
The Common Gesture
(Poetry/2018)
Translated from the French by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody
_____
Maxime Coton was born in 1986. Devotes himself to literature in different forms and media, because books are needed but not enough. Aims to find balance between poetic and political topics. Has won several poetic awards in Belgium and abroad.
The Cybermohalla Ensemble
What is is that Flows Between Us
(Monsoon/2007)
On Writing
(Winter/2012)
Translated from the Hindi by Shveta Sarda
_____
The Cybermohalla Ensemble is Azra Tabassum, Shamsher Ali, Lakhmi Kohli, Love Anand, Neelofar, Babli Rai, Nasreen, Jaanu Nagar, Rabiya Quraishy, Rakesh Khairalia.
The Ensemble has emerged from within the project called "Cybermohalla", a network of dispersed labs for experimentation and exploration among young people in different neighbourhoods of the city, that was initiated by Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education, Delhi and Sarai-CSDS, Delhi in the year 2001.
Over the years, the ensemble has produced a very wide range of materials, practices, works and structures. Their work has circulated and been shown in online journals, radio broadcasts, publications, neighbourhood gatherings, contemporary and new media art exhibitions.
Cybermohalla Ensemble’s publications include Bahurupiya Shehr (Rajkamal, Delhi 2007), Trickster City (Penguin India, 2010), No Apologies for the Interruption. They have been published in The rest of now;, Companion book to Manifesta7, co-curated by Raqs Media Collective (Companion Book ed. Rana Dasgupta), 2008, City Improbable, a collection of writings about Delhi, ed. Khushwant Singh, Penguin-India, 2010.
Jibanananda Das
from Bonolata Sen
(Poetry/Winter 2016)
Translated from the Bengali by Souradeep Roy
_____
Jibanananda Das is the most significant poet in Bengali literature in the post-Tagore era. He was the most significant in the Kallol era, which pioneered modernism in Bengali literature. His collections include Jhora Palok (Fallen Feathers, 1927), Dhushor Pandulipi (Grey Manuscript, 1936), Bonolata Sen (1942), Moha Prithibi (Great Earth, 1944), Shaat'ti Tarar Timir (The Darkness of Seven Stars, 1948). Jibanananda died in a tram accident in 1954. In 1955, his Shreshtha Kabita (Best Poems) received the Sahitya Akademi Award from the National Academy of Letters. Posthumous collections include Rupasi Bangla (Beautiful Bengal, 1957), Bela Obela Kalbela (Times, Bad Times, End Times, 1961). Several of his works were published posthumously. which include several unpublished poems, novels and short stories. His critical study of poetry was published as Kobitar Katha (Some Words on Poetry). All the poems translated here are from his third collection Bonolata Sen.
Nitoo Das
Volucrine
(Poetry/Winter 2017)
_____
Nitoo Das is a birder, caricaturist and poet. Her first collection of poetry, Boki, was published in 2008, and her second, Cyborg Proverbs, was brought out by Poetrywala in September 2017. She teaches English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi.
Eugenio de Signoribus
By the Inner Roads
(Poetry/Winter 2014)
Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon
_____
Eugenio De Signoribus was born and lives in the Adriatic coastal town of Cupra Marittima, Italy. Five volumes of his poetry were collected together in Poesie (1976-2007) (Garzanti, 2008) for which he won the Viareggio Prize in 2008. Recent publications include Nessun luogo è elementare (Alberto Tallone Editore, 2010), Trinità dell'esodo (Garzanti, 2011) (from which the translations published here are taken) and Veglie genovesi (Canneto Editore, 2013). Other translations of his poetry have appeared in The FSG Book of Twentieth Century Italian Poetry (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2012).
Nandini Dhar
Nirma Memory
(Poetry/Monsoon 2018)
_____
Nandini Dhar is a bilingual poet who writes in Bangla and English. She is the author of two full-length poetry books, Historians of Redunant Moments (Agape Editions, 2016) and Jitakshara (Aainanagar Prakashani, 2016). She is also the author of the chapbook Occupying MyTongue, as part of the FIVE chapbook project, undertaken by the online little magazines Aainanagar and Vyavaya. Nandini hails from Kolkata, and divides her time between Sonipat, Haryana and her hometown.
Namdeo Dhasal
Nine poems
(Poetry / Monsoon 2008)
Translated from the Marathi by Dilip Chitre
_____
Namdeo Dhasal was born in 1949 , in a former 'untouchable community' in Pur-Kanersar village near Pune in Maharashtra. As a teenage taxi driver he lived among pimps, prostitutes, petty criminals, and gangsters in Bombay's underworld. He has had very little formal education. In 1972, he founded Dalit Panther, the militant organisation inspired by the Black Panther movement. The same year he published Golpitha. Since then he has published eight collections of poems from which this selection is drawn. In 2004 Sahitya Akademi hounered Dhasal with the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Dhasal's long-time friend and bilingual poet Dilip Chitre, acclaimed for his translations of the seventeen century Marathi poet-saint Tukaram, has translated Dhasal into English.
Dhoomil
Five Poems
(Poetry/Monsoon 2015)
Translated from the Hindi by Rahul Soni
_____
Dhoomil was the pen-name of Sudama Panday, who was born in Khewali, a village near Varanasi, in 1936. He was educated in the village and in Varanasi, and was an instructor at the Industrial Training Institute in the city for several years. He died in 1975. He published one collection, Sansad se Sadak Tak (From the Parliament to the Street, 1972), during his short lifetime and one posthumous collection, Kal Sunna Mujhe (Hear Me Tomorrow, 1977), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1979.
Linh Dinh
Eleven Poems
(Poetry/Monsoon 2008)
(Translator) Poems by by Nguyen Quoc Chanh
(Poetry/Monsoon 2008)
_____
Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the US in 1975, and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003), American Tatts (Chax 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School 2006) and Jam Alerts (Chax 2007), with a novel, Love Like Hate, scheduled to be released in 2008 by Seven Stories Press. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, Best American Poetry 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and he has been invited to read his works all over the US, London, Cambridge, Berlin and Reykjavik. He has also published widely in Vietnamese.
Richard Dixon
(Translator) One Language, Many Cultures, Claudio Magris
(Special Issue: Style / Winter 2012)
(Translator) By the Inner Roads, Eugenio de Signoribus
(Poetry/Winter 2014)
_____
Richard Dixon lives and works in Italy. His translations include The Prague Cemetery and Inventing the Enemy by Umberto Eco (Houghton Mifflin, Harvill Secker, 2011 and 2012); he was one of the translators of Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone (Farrar Straus Giroux, Penguin Books, 2013); his translation of Ardor by Roberto Calasso, a ‘book-length essay’ about ritual and sacrifice in Vedic India, was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux and Penguin Books in November 2014.
Biswamit Dwibedy
From Wren and Martin
(Poetry/Winter 2017)
_____
Biswamit Dwibedy is the author of Ozalid (1913 Press, 2010), Eirik's Ocean (Portable Press, 2016), and Ancient Guest (HarperCollins, 2017), with two new books forthcoming: Erode and Hubble Gardener (Spuyten Duyvil Press), and a chapbook titled MC3 (Essay Press) out next year. He is the editor of Anew Print and a co-editor for the journal 1913. In 2014, he guest edited a dossier of contemporary Indian poetry, translated from seven regional languages, for Aufgabe13, published by Litmus Press. He lives in Bangalore, where he teaches at the Srishti Insititute of Art, Design, and Technology, and directs the Anew Writing Program.
Mikhail Epstein
Almost Island Acknowledgments and Preface to the English Edition
Auto-Commentary
(Prose/Monsoon 2007)
Translated from the Russian by Eve Adler
____
Mikhail N. Epstein (Epshtein) was born in Moscow in 1950 but has lived in the United States since 1990, where he teaches at Emory University. He remains one of Russia's most respected philosophers and theorists, and the author of a range of quirky, highly individualistic, somewhat Borgesian projects--invented researches, disciplines, arts, neologisms on subjects as varied as “touch art,” new movements in Russian poetry, and "post-atheism." He works through what he calls "potentiation" that "both inherits the method of deconstruction and moves beyond it"-- towards a kind of constructive inventiveness. His latest project is “On the Future of the Humanities: Paradigmatic Shifts and Emerging Concepts”.
Translations of Epstein’s 17 books and approximately 400 essays and articles can often be found in library catalogues under his Russian surname, Epshtein.
Luisa Futoransky
The Clear Marble Slab
(Poetry/Winter 2020)
Translated from the Spanish by Philippa Page
____
Luisa Futoranksy (Buenos Aires, 1939) is a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist and music scholar. She is particularly known as being one of Argentina’s most renowned contemporary poets and is the author of some 20 collections of poems, 5 novels, as well as a number of non-fiction works, much of which has been translated. Author of some twenty collections of poetry, four novels and two works of non-fiction, Futoransky's literature traces its path across six decades and five continents. Recent books include the forthcoming Bajo los nísperos (Leviatán), Los años argentinos (Leviatán, 2019), El poema, dos lugares (Ars 2018), Marchar de día (Leviatán, 2017) and 23.53 Noveleta (Leviatán, 2013). Her collection, Ortigas (2011), was translated into English and published by Shearsman Books in 2016. Her poetry has received awards in France, Spain and Argentina. Most notably, Luisa was honoured by the French government as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
In 1991, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1993 and in 2010, fellowships from the Centre National des Lettres in Paris. In 1997, she was invited as Regent’s Lecturer to the University of California, Berkeley. She is regularly invited to lecture at prestigious universities in France, Spain, Argentina and United States. Likewise, she is regularly invited as a guest author to international literary festivals. Futoransky’s work is often cited in studies of contemporary Argentine women’s writing as well as those dealing with issues of exile, transnational identity, language, contemporary Latin American poetry or Argentine writers in Paris. Fluent in Spanish, French, English, Hebrew and Italian, her oeuvre brings together an incredibly rich array of cultural references inspired by her experiences living and travelling across Latin America, Europe and East Asia, which she blends together with distinctive echoes of home.
Forrest Gander
A Clearing
(Poetry/Monsoon 2008)
Homage to Translation: Benjamin in Japan
Homage to Translation: Argentina
(Prose/Monsoon 2008)
(Translator) The Night by Jaime Saenz
(Prose/Monsoon 2008)
_____
Forrest Gander is the author of books of poems, translations, and prose, much of it published by New Directions. He has edited several anthologies of poems in translation and individual books by Mexican and Latin American writers. The recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Maxwell Memorial Prize, Pushcart Prize, Gertrude Stein Award, and awards from PEN, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Whiting and the Guggenheim foundations, Gander publishes critical essays for numerous journals, including The Nation, The Boston Review, and The Providence Journal. He was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University in Rhode Island. His website can be found here.
Sun Ganlu
The Messenger’s Letter
(Prose/Monsoon 2010)
Translated from the Chinese by Daniel Clutton, Gina Wang, and He Jing
____
San Ganlu was born in Shanghai. He is currently a member and director of the Shanghai writers' association, deputy director of the Shanghai Culture and Arts committee, and chief strategist at the Shanghai Weekly.
His works include the novel Breathing, Asking Women to Solve Riddles, and Remembering the Lady of Qin. He also has a collection of short stories and novellas, A Visit to Dreamland, collection of essays Dancing on the Ceiling and Slower than Slow, Shanghai over the years. His work has been translated into French, Russian, Japanese, English, Italian, and many other languages.
He is a winner of the Shanghai literature award.
Ge Fei
Remembering Mr. Wu You
(Prose/Monsoon 2009)
Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt)
_____
Ge Fei is one of China's most important fiction writers. His novels include Flag of Desire, Ren Mian Tao Hua, (winner of the Chinese Media Outstanding Novel and Dinglun Biennial Literature Award), and Shan He Ru Meng. He is also the author of the novellas, Encounter, Fool's Poetry, and Only Rubbish, and of many acclaimed short stories. His scholarly works include On Fiction Narration, Pendulum of Kafka, and Syren Songs. He is currently Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Susan Gevirtz
Notes from Pre
(Poetry/Monsoon 2013)
____
Susan Gevirtz’s books of poetry include AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger, Kelsey St., 2010; BROADCAST, Trafficker, 2009; Thrall, Post Apollo, 2007; Hourglass Transcripts, Burning Deck, 2001. Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson, Peter Lang, 1996; and Coming Events (Collected Writings), from Nightboat Press, 2013. She teaches at California College of the Arts. Gevirtz has co-organized the annual translation and conversation meeting of The Paros Symposium with Greek poet Siarita Kouka, and guest organizers Eleni Stecopoulos, Liana Sakelliou and Socrates Kabouropoulos for eight years.
Michelle Gil-Montero
(Translator) from Riddance (Andanza) by Maria Negroni
(Poetry/Winter 2009)
____
Michelle Gil-Montero has an MFA in Poetry from The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her translations of Latin American poetry have appeared recently in Jacket, Conjunctions, Cipher, eXchanges, and others, and her poetry has been published in recent issues of Colorado Review, Third Coast, and Cincinnati Review. She lives in Pittsburgh and teaches creative writing at Saint Vincent College.
Renee Gladman
Origins
(Prose/Winter 2014)
____
Renee Gladman is the author of eight works of prose and poetry, most recently the first three novels of the Ravicka series, published by Dorothy Project. A short novel, Morelia, and a book of essays, Calamities, are forthcoming in 2015. Her current project explores the intersections of narrative and architecture through drawing and writing about drawing. She lives in northeastern United States with the poet-ceramicist, Danielle Vogel.
Howard Goldblatt
(Translator) Remembering Mr. Wu You by Ge Fei
(Prose/Monsoon 2009)
____
Howard Goldblatt is the translator of many Chinese works of fiction including those by the Nobel winner Mo Yan, The Taste of Apples by Huan Chunming, The Execution of Mayor Yin by Chen Ruoxi. He was Research Professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame.
Joy Goswami
From The Ashen Sun
(Poetry/Monsoon 2008)
Translated from the Bengali by Sampurna Chatterjee
____
Joy Goswami was born on November 10, 1954 in Kolkata. Goswami's formal education stopped early, in grade eleven. His first poetry collection, named Christmas o Sheeter Sonnetguchchho (Sonnets of Christmas and Winter) brought him immediate critical acclaim. Goswami is one of the most powerful poets of Bengal and one of the best in the post-Jibanananda Das era of Bengali poetry. Primarily a poet, he has also written novels and literary prose. He has more than 30 published books, including three volumes of compiled poems numbering close to a thousand. He has written 12 novels, two of which are written in verse and 5 collections of essays related to interpretation and appreciation of Bengali poetry. He has received the most prestigious Ananda Puroshkar twice, in 1990 for Ghumiyechho Jhaupata? (Have you slept, Pineleaf?) and in 1998 for Jara Brishtite Bhijechhilo (Those Drenched in Rain). In 1997 he won the Bangla Academy Puroshkar for Bajrobidyut-bharti Khata (Scrapbook of Thunder and Lightning) and in the same year he also won the Birendra Chattopadhyay Smriti award for Patar Poshak (Garments of Leaf). The Sahitya Academy Award from the government of India came in 2000 for his collection of poems Paagli Tomar Shongey (With You, Crazy Girl). Goswami has expressed his dissent on several grave injustices that have taken place in India. These include the mass killing of Dalits in Jehana village in 2001 and the Nandigram massacre of 2007. He has been vocal against state brutalities. His poems have taken a very different turn in his most recent book of poems Shashoker Proti (To The Powers That Be), translated into English by Sampurna Chattarji. In 2007 he left the premier Bengali magazine, Desh and joined the newspaper, Sanbad Protidin, where he currently works.
Nikhil Govind
The Shape of a Scar
(Special Issue: Style/Winter 2012)
(Translator) Brahmarakshas by Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh
(Poems / Winter 2011)
(Translator) from In the Dark by Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh
(Poems / Winter 2011)
____
Nikhil Govind has a doctoral degree in south asian literature at the University of California at Berkeley. His research focuses on the figure of the revolutionary in the mid century Hindi novel. His poems have appeared in Chandrabhaga and his Haibuns and Haikus have appeared in Pirene's Fountain. A video of him reading poems (with A.B. Spellman) as part of UC Berkeley's Holloway Series in Poetry can be found here. He is currently teaching in the Manipal Center for Philosophy and the Humanities.
Heather Green
(Translator) from Midis gagnés by Tristan Tzara
(Poetry / Winter 2017)
____
Heather Green's translation of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won will be published in 2018 as the inaugural volume in Octopus Books’ Poetry in Translation series, and her translation of his short collection Guide to the Heart Rail was recently published in a limited-run art-edition by Goodmorning Menagerie. Her poems and translations have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The New Yorker, Poetry International, and many other journals.
Sreekantha Gummuluri
(Translator) Tigerform, Viswanatha Satyanarayana
(Prose/Monsoon 2016)
____
Sreekantha Gummuluri is a BEd/MA (Anthropology) from Andhra University and has worked as a secondary school teacher in Mumbai for many years. She has been a lifelong avid reader of Telugu and English literature, and has been writing fiction and poetry in Telugu in the recent years apart from doing translation work.
Satya Gummuluri
(Translator) Tigerform, Viswanatha Satyanarayana
(Prose/Monsoon 2016)
____
Satya Gummuluri is an artist based in the Munich area. Trained in engineering and music, she has devoted herself to writing, music (composition/vocals) and conceptual art over the past decade, as well as doing editorial and translation work. She has performed and recorded with jazz and improvised music groups, and is currently engaged with Surfatial.
Epsita Haldar
(Translator) My Sleepwalking Mother
by Abul Bashr
(Prose/Winter 2017)
_____
Epsita Halder teaches Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University. She works on the Muharram traditions of West Bengal, for which she has received grants from the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore, and Sarai-CSDS. She writes on vernacular Islam, Muslim popular piety and new medial practices. She is currently working on a new book about her ethnographic journeys.
Han Shaogong
From A Dictionary of Maqiao
(Prose/Monsoon 2019)
Translated from the Chinese by Julia Lovell
_____
Han Shaogong 韩少功 is one of the representative names of Chinese contemporary literature, often mentioned in the same breath as Wang Meng, Feng Jicai and Liu Suola. During the mid-eighties, he led the development of a literary school called "Root-seeking literature," the practitioners of which sought to distill an independent, "Chinese" narrative from their rural backgrounds. Something of a hermit, Han Shaogong moved back to the countryside of his native Hunan province after several years working for the Writer's Association of Hainan. A prolific writer, Han Shaogong is famous for his novellas Da Da Da and Woman Woman Woman, as well as for the full-length novel A Dictionary of Maqiao, first published in 1996 and translated by Julia Lovell into English in 2003. In 1987, he collaborated on a translation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being into Chinese.
Han Yu
The Original Way
(Special Issue:Style, Winter 2012)
Translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein
_____
Han Yu 韓愈 (768 - 824) was a mid-Tang man of letters and a forefather of the Neo-Confucianism of the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279). A believer in a strong central government and the supremacy of Chinese tradition, he saw moral rectitude embodied through a direct and unadorned literary style and led the Ancient Prose Movement with his friend Liu Zongyuan (773 - 819). He passed the Imperial Examination in 792 (his fourth try), was promoted to a post in the central government in 802, but exiled in 819 for remonstrating the emperor for his acceptance of Buddhism (he was reinstated shortly before he died). In addition to “The Original Way,” among his most famous prose pieces are “Treatise on the Buddha’s Finger Bone” and his “Address to the Crocodiles”; he is also known for writing a thoroughly unpoetic poetry.
Geoff Hargreaves
(Translator) Suits of Armour by Fabio Morabito
(Prose/Monsoon 2008)
_____
Geoff Hargreaves is a translator from the Italian and Spanish into English. He has translated Carmen Boulossa, Patricia Laurent and others.
Anjum Hasan
Bangalore Diaries
(Poetry/Winter 2018)
_____
Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head, and the short story collections A Day in the Life and Difficult Pleasures. She has also published a book of poems called Street on the Hill. Her books have been nominated for various awards including the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the Hindu Best Fiction Award and the Crossword Fiction Award. She has been Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury and visiting professor of creative writing at Ashoka University.
Brian Henry
(Translator) Three Prose Poems by Ales Steger
(Poetry/Winter 2018)
_____
Brian Henry is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Static & Snow (Black Ocean, 2015). He co-edited the international magazine Verse from 1995 to 2017 and established the Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2015. His translation of Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 and won the Best Translated Book Award. He also has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (Harcourt, 2008) and Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers (BOA, 2015). His poetry and translations have received numerous honors, including an NEA fellowship, a Howard Foundation grant, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the Cecil B. Hemley Memorial Award, the George Bogin Memorial Award, and a Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences grant.
W.N.Herbert
Bad Shaman Blues
New Poems
(Poetry/Monsoon 2008)
_____
W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961, and educated there and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he published his Ph.D. thesis on the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid (To Circumjack MacDiarmid, OUP, 1992). He has published seven volumes of poetry and four pamphlets, and he is widely anthologised.
His last five collections, all with the northern publisher Bloodaxe, have won numerous accolades. Forked Tongue (1994) was selected for the New Generation promotion, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot and Saltire prizes. Cabaret McGonagall (1996) won a Northern Arts Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward and McVities prizes; and The Laurelude (1998), written whilst he was the Wordsworth Fellow at Grasmere, was a PBS Recommendation. All three books won Scottish Arts Council book awards. The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002) was longlisted for Scottish Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Saltire Prize. His most recent Bloodaxe collection, Bad Shaman Blues (2006), was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Award and the T.S.Eliot Prize.
He taught in the Department of Creative Writing at Lancaster University (1996-2002), and is now Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing in the School of English at the University of Newcastle.
David Herd
Walk Song
(Poetry/Monsoon2019)
Outwith
(Special Issue: Style/Winter 2012)
Tuesday/How to Breathe/from The Hut/Prose/Disclaimer
(Poetry/Monsoon 2007)
____
David Herd’s collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet 2012), Outwith (Bookthug 2012), and Through (Carcanet, 2016). He has given readings and lectures in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, India, Italy, Poland, the USA and the UK, and his poems, essays and reviews have been widely published in magazines, journals and newspapers. He is the author of John Ashbery and American Poetry (2000), Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature (2007), and the editor of Contemporary Olson (2015). His recent writings on the politics of human movement have appeared in Detention Unlocked, Los Angeles Review of Books, Parallax, PN Review and the TLS. He is a co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales and Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent.
Takashi Hiraide
from The Fighting Spirit of the Walnut
(Poetry/Winter 2011
Translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu
____
Takashi Hiraide, born in Fukuoka prefecture in 1950, is a major poet coming out of Japan's postwar generation. He is the author of over fifteen books, and is a recipient of several literary awards in the various genres in which he writes. These include poetry in free verse (The Inn), prose poetry (For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut), off-prose poetry (Notes for My Left-hand Diary), tanka (One Hundred and Eleven Tankas to Mourn My Father), criticism (At the Tip of Attack), essay (The Berlin Moment), and fiction (A Guest Cat). He is a Professor of Art Science and a member of the Institute for Art Anthropology at Tama Art University.
Ranjit Hoskote
Render
(Poetry/Winter 2017)
____
Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and curator. His collections of poetry include Zones of Assault (Rupa & Co., 1991), The Cartographer’s Apprentice (Pundole Art Gallery, 2000), The Sleepwalker’s Archive (Single File, 2001), Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), and Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014). Two volumes of his poetry have appeared in German translation: Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006), and Feldnotizen des Magiers (Editions Offenes Feld, 2015). Hoskote’s translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of the anthology, Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (Penguin/ Viking, 2002), and of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012).
Hoskote’s poems have appeared in many anthologies, including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Jeet Thayil ed., Bloodaxe, 2008), Language for a New Century (Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar eds., W. W. Norton, 2008), and These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo eds., Penguin, 2012). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Akzente, The Iowa Review, 3am, Poetry Review (London), Poetry Wales, The Wolf, and Wespennest.
Khalida Hussain
Half-Woman
(Prose/Winter 2020)
Translated from the Urdu by Haider Shahbaz
____
Khalida Hussain (1937-2019) was a renowned Urdu fiction writer. She was the author of multiple story collections and a recipient of the Pride of Performance award, one of the highest civilian honours given by the Pakistan government.
Ishion Hutchinson
An Outpost of Progress
(Special Issue: The Past/Spring 2014)
____
Ishion Hutchinson (http://ishionhutchinson.com) was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His poetry collection, Far District: Poems (2010), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. He is the Meringoff Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and a contributing editor to the literary journal, Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.
Lewis Hyde
To Complete the Incomplete: An Essay on Oxherding
(Special Issue: The Past/Spring 2014)
(Translator) Oxherding by Kakuon Shion & Jion
(Special Issue:The Past/Spring 2014)
____
Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. Hyde’s most recent book, Common as Air, is a spirited defense of our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich in the present. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Imayam
The Story of Nanmarankottai
(Prose/Monsoon 2018)
Translated from the Tamil by Padma Narayanan
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Imayam is one of the most prominent and important writers of contemporary fiction in Tamil today. So far, he has written five novels, five short story collections and a novella. His first novel Koveru Kazhudhaigal (‘The Mules’) is considered one of the modern classics of Tamil Dalit writing; of it, the older writer Sundara Ramaswamy said, ‘There is no novel that equals this one in the last 100 years of Tamil writing.’ He has received numerous state- and national-level awards, including the Agni Akshara Award (1994), the Anantha Vikatan Award (2016) and the Award for Contemporary Literature in Tamil given by The Hindu, a prominent English newspaper (2018).
Hijab Imtiaz Ali
From Belles Lettres
(Poetry/Winter 2017)
Translated by Sachsa Aurora Akhtar
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Hijab Imtiaz Ali (1908-1999) was the first Muslim woman pilot in the Indian subcontinent. That however, is not her best-known accomplishment, for Hijab was a child genius, writing her first bestselling novel Meri Natamam Mohabbat at the age of twelve. It is considered one of the best love stories ever written in Urdu literature. She continued to be a prolific writer throughout her life, and has been called ‘The Queen of Urdu Romanticism‘. In Adab-E-Zareen she adheres to no traditional conception of form or genre, reflecting with authenticity the freedom with which she lived her life.
Aishwarya Iyer
From The Grasp of Things
(Poetry/Manuscript Competition/Monsoon 2o16)
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Aishwarya Iyer was raised in India and Bahrain, and studied literature at the universities of Mumbai, Jadavpur and Pennsylvania. She has worked as a researcher, teacher, and editor. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as QLRS, Eclectica, Kindle Magazine, Sweet Magazine, Humanities Underground, and on the Tumblr of Berfrois, and she won the 2015 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. She is working on her first manuscript of poetry, The Grasp of Things, and lives in Bangalore.
Tsitsi Jaji
Harbour
(Poetry/Monsoon 2021)
The Crystal River
(Poetry/Monsoon 2018)
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Tsitsi Jaji is the 2018 winner of the Cave Canem / Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for her second book, Mother Tongues, excerpted here and to be published in 2019. Her first full-length collection, Beating the Graves (African Poetry Book Fund / U Nebraska Press, 2017) was a runner-up for the 2015 Sillerman Prize, and her chapbook, Carnaval, appeared in the first New Generation African Poets box-set. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Black Renaissance Noire, Harvard Review, Boston Review online, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series and elsewhere. Jaji is a professor of English and African & African American Studies at Duke University. She has taught writing workshops in her home country, Zimbabwe, and is the author of Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2014). She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Schomburg Center (NEH), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
Torin Jensen
(Translator) Twelve Poems (Which Prologue a Flood) by Valerie Mejer Caso
(Poetry / Spring 2017)
(Translator) from Without Republic by Valerie Mejer Caso
(Poetry / Monsoon 2016
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Torin Jensen is a poet and translator living in Denver, where he edits Goodmorning Menagerie. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Asymptote, Mandorla, and The Volta. He is the author of Phase sponge [ ] the keep (Solar Luxuriance 2014).
Miljenko Jergovic
Buick Riviera
(Prose/Monsoon 2010)
Translated from the Bosnian by Russel Scott Valentino
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Miljenko Jergović was born in Sarajevo in 1966. A poet, prose fiction writer, and journalist, he has published more than twenty books (of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction), and his work has been translated extensively throughout the world. Buick Riviera was made into a feature film in 2008 by filmmaker Goran Rušinović, and the two were in turn awarded the Golden Arena prize for best screenplay. He lives in Zagreb, Croatia.
Ouyang Jianghe
Drifter in the North: Four Poems
(Poetry/Winter 2019)
From Taj Mahal Tears
(Poetry/Spring 2017)
Translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein
Five Poems
(Poetry/Monsoon 2009)
Translated from the Chinese by Austin Woerner, Michael Day
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Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河 is a poet, critic, calligrapher, professor of Creative Writing at Beijing Normal University, and publication director of Jintian (Today). Born in 1956 in Luzhou, Sichuan, he is the author of over ten books of poetry and criticism published in mainland China, as well as the recipient of the Chinese Literature Media Award in Poetry and the Cambridge University’s Silver Willow award. His works have been translated into over ten languages, including the books Doubled Shadows and Phoenix, translated into English by Austin Woerner and published by Zephyr Press.
He Jing
(Translator) From The Messenger’s Letter by Sun Ganlu
(Prose/Monsoon 2010)
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He Jing teaches at the School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University
Kent Johnson
I Once Met
33 Rules for Poetry
(Poetry/Monsoon 2007)
(Translator) The Night by Jaime Saenz
(Poetry/Monsoon 2008)
(Translator) Four Poems by Amanda Berenguer
(Special Issue: Style/Winter 2012)
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Kent Johnson is the editor and literary executor of the poets Araki Yasusada, Tosa Motokiyu and Alexandra Papaditsas, the translator into English (with Forrest Gander) of the major Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz, and the author, most recently, of the books of poems Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War and Epigramititis (epigrams on 118 living American poets). An important selection of his various works recently appeared in Bosnia, from Eiffel’s Bridge Books. He grew up in Uruguay and worked in rural Nicaragua in 1980 and 1983, teaching basic literacy and adult education during the Sandinista revolution, translating and compiling an anthology of Nicaraguan working class poets. He currently teaches English composition and Spanish at Highland Community College in Illinois. He is editor (with Roberto Echavarren) of Hotel Lautreamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay, published by Shearsman Books.
Adil Jussawalla
Amaryllis: Three Poems
(Poetry / Monsoon 2020)
St. Mote
(Poetry / Monsoon 2015)
Before and After
(Interviews / Monsoon 2012)
Being There: Aspects of an Indian Crisis
(Essay/Monsoon 2010)
New Poems
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
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Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940 and went to school there. He left it in 1957 to study Architecture in London but dropped out. He read English Language and Literature at Oxford and worked in London, primarily as an English language teacher, after graduating. He has lived mainly in Bombay with his wife Veronik after returning to the city in 1970. Books of poems: Land's End,1962, revised edition 2020.; Missing Person, 1976. Trying to Say Goodbye, 2011,
The Right Kind of Dog, 2013, Gulestan (chapbook) 2017, Shorelines, 2019, The Tattooed Teetotaller and Other Winder, 2021. Books of Prose: Maps for a Mortal Moon, 2014, The Magic Hand of Chance, 2021. A book of poems, fiction, and nin-fiction: I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky, 2015.Anthologies: New Writing in India (1974), Statements (co-edited with Eunice de Souza), 1976. Honours: Sahitya Akademi Award (for Trying to Say Goodbye), Tata Literature Live Poet Laureate for 2021.
Sonam Kachru
Make Humans Again: A Portfolio of 19thc Kashmiri Poetry
(Poetry/Monsoon 2012)
The Last Embrace of Colour and Leaf
(Special Issue:Style/Winter 2012)
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Sonam Kachru is a student of concepts in history, whether such concepts are brought into view through arguments offered in dry-as-dust philosophical analysis, or arguments metrically made with all the resources of narrative. He is particularly interested in the history of philosophy and literature available in Sanskrit which he pursues awake to the trials of thought elsewhere but without an interest in comparison alone. He is currently a PhD student in the Philosophy of Religions Program at the University of Chicago; his dissertation essays a reconstruction of the arguments for an elegant, if sinuous criterion for the nature of mind put forward by the fifth century philosopher from Peshawar, Vasubandhu. This being a work in the history of metaphysics and philosophy of mind narrowly construed, Kachru also hopes to complete a slightly unrulier work, Pleasure in a Time of Leaves, an essay on Aśvaghoṣa's poetics, soon. When he is not beating such bushes as thrive in Sanskrit or its neighboring languages from pre-modern history, Kachru translates from Kashmiri poetry of the twentieth century. Some poems form the ongoing book-length project may be seen here.
Jayant Kaikini
A Spare Pair of Legs
(Prose/Winter 2017)
Translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana
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Jayant Kaikini, Kannada poet, short-story writer, columnist and playwright, with six short-story volumes, five poetry collections, three collections of non-fiction, and three plays to his credit, is also a much sought-after award-winning lyricist, script and dialogue writer for Kannada films. He won his first Karnataka Sahitya Akademi award at the age of nineteen in 1974 for his debut poetry collection, followed by three more in 1982, 1989 and 1996, for his short-story collections. He has also received the Dinakar Desai Award for poetry, the B.H. Sridhar award for fiction, the Katha National Award and the Rujuwathu Trust Fellowship for his writing. He is the recipient of the Karnataka State Award for best dialogue and lyrics, and the Filmfare Award for best lyrics in Kannada four times – in 2008, 2009, 2016 and 2017. Born in the coastal temple-town Gokarn, Kaikini is a biochemist by training and worked with pharmaceutical companies in Mumbai for two decades before moving to Bangalore, where he lives presently. A well-known television personality, he was given an honorary doctorate from Tumkur University in 2011 for his contribution to Kannada literature, film and television. He was honoured as Zee Kannadiga of the Decade in 2016. He was the first recipient of the Kusumagraj Rashtriya Bhasha Sahitya Puraskar in 2010.
Bhanu Kapil
Style Handbook for New Immigrants to the US
(Special Issue: Style / Winter 2012)
From Humananimal
(Prose/Monsoon 2009)
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Bhanu Kapil is the author of four books of prose/poetry, most recently Humanimal [Kelsey Street Press, 2009] and Schizophrene (Nighboat Books, 2011). She writes a daily blog during the school year: Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? [A Day in the Life of a Naropa University Writing Professor.] Next year, she will present her research on hallucination, narrative and touch at the World Conference for Cross-Cultural Psychiatry in London.
She has recently been awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for her poetry.
Ayane Kawata
From Castles in the Air: A Dream Journal
(Poetry/Winter 2011)
Translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu
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Ayane Kawata was born in 1940 in the city of Qiqihar in the Heilongjiang Province of northeast China. In 1969, the publication of and subsequent acclaim she received for her first book, Time of Sky (Kumo Publishers, 1969), established her as a prominent and emerging Japanese poet. The same year, she moved to Italy, where she has lived for most of her subsequent years. Kawata has published ten books of poetry, the majority of them by the most important publishers of contemporary Japanese poetry: Shichosha, Shoshi Yamada, and Seidosha. Her poems have often featured in major poetry publication journals in Japan, such as Gendaishitecho, Midnight Press, and Eureka, and have been widely anthologized. In 1994 she was selected to have a book in the prestigious Gendaishi Bunko Series, anthologizing and republishing a sizable selection of her work. Time of Sky / Castles in the Air is Kawata's first book-length translation into English.
Lucas Klein
(Translator) Drifter in the North by Ouyang Jianghe
(Poetry/Monsoon 2019)
(Translator) On Reading: Two Poems by Xi Chuan
(Poetry/Monsoon 2019)
(Translator) From Taj Mahal Tears by Ouyang Jianghe
(Poetry/Spring 2017)
(Translator) What the Tang Did Not Have by Xi Chuan
(Prose/Special Issue:Style/Winter 2012)
(Translator) The Original Way by Han Yu
(Special Issue: Style/Winter 2012)
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Lucas Klein is a father, writer, and translator, as well as assistant professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (New Directions) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize, and his scholarship and criticism has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, PMLA, and other venues. Other publications include October Dedications, his translations of the poetry of Mang Ke (Zephyr and Chinese University Press, 2018), and contributions to Li Shangyin (New York Review Books, 2018), as well as the monograph The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness (Brill, 2018). His translations of the poetry of Duo Duo, forthcoming from Yale University Press, recently won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.
Jee Leong Koh
Does Grass Sweat
(Poetry/Winter 2016)
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Jee Leong Koh’s latest book of poems Steep Tea (Carcanet) is a Financial Times Best Book of 2015. Jee is the author of three other books of poems and a book of zuihitsu. His work has been shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize and translated into Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, he now lives in New York City, where he edits the arts blog Singapore Poetry and runs the Singapore Literature Festival in NYC.
Steve Komarnyckyj
(Translator) A Concert From Mercury by Bohdan Ihor Antonych
(Poetry/Winter 2014)
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Steve Komarnyckyj’s literary translations and poems have appeared in Vsesvit magazine (Ukraine’s most influential literary journal), The North, the Echo Room, Envoi, the Los Angeles Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. His first book of poetry in translation, The Rasberry’s Eyelash, a selection of one of the most powerful poets in any language, Pavlo Tychyna, was published by Poetry Salzburg in December 2011. The book was described as a “revelation” by Sean Street, poet and Radio 4 broadcaster. His selection of Ihor Pavlyuk’s translated poetry, A Flight over the Black Sea, was published by Waterloo Press in 2014 and won an English PEN award. He and his partner Susie run Kalyna Language Press, a publisher and agency which among other things strives to bring neglected Ukrainian and minority language authors to a wider audience.
László Krasznahorkai
He Rises At Dawn
(Prose/Monsoon 2013)
Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet
An Island of Doubt
(Interview/Monsoon 2012)
From Satantango
(Prose/Monsoon 2008)
Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes
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László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954, in the town of Gyula in the east of Hungary, close to the Romanian border. Having studied law first then literature in Budapest, he went on to publish a series of novels and other writings. His works include Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, Animalinside, and Seiobo there Below. His books have been translated into several languages and have received international prizes. The first two of his novels have been made into films by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr and they have co-operated on a number of films.
Nicholas Laughlin
from Small Husband
(Poetry/Winter 2011)
The Strange Years of My Life
(Poetry/Winter 2011)
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Nicholas Laughlin is the editor of The Caribbean Review of Books and a writer with a particular interest in Caribbean literature and art. His essays, reviews, and poems have been published in various journals and catalogues, and most are also available on his website.
He is also co-director of Alice Yard, a contemporary art space and network based in Port of Spain, and co-editor of the broadside literature and art journal Town. He was born and has always lived in Trinidad.
John Robert Lee
Homage
(Poetry/Spring 2017)
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John Robert Lee (b. St. Lucia 1948) has published several collections of poetry. His short stories and poems have been widely anthologised. His reviews and columns have appeared with regularity in newspapers, local and regional. He has also produced and presented radio and television programmes in St. Lucia for many years. His books include Saint Lucian (1988), Artefacts (2000), Canticles (2007), Elemental (2008), Sighting (2013), City Remembrances (2016), and Song and Symphony (2016). He compiled and edited Roseau Valley and other poems for Brother George Odlum (2003), Bibliography of Saint Lucian Creative Writing 1948-2013 (2013); he co-edited Saint Lucian Literature and Theatre: an anthology of reviews (2006) with fellow St. Lucian poet Kendel Hippolyte and co-edited Sent Lisi: poems and art of Saint Lucia (2014) with Kendel Hippolyte, Jane King and Vladimir Lucien. His Collected Poems 1975-2015 is now available from Peepal Tree Press.
Ben Lerner
Auto-Tune
(Special Issue: Style/Winter 2012
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Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of the novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House, 2011), and three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006), and Mean Free Path (2010), all published by Copper Canyon Press. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and a Howard Foundation Fellow. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie for the German translation of The Lichtenberg Figures. His art and literary criticism has appeared widely and he edits poetry for Critical Quarterly. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College.
Li Tuo
1985
(Essay/Monsoon 2009)
Translated from the Chinese by Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg
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Born in 1939, Li Tuo spent twenty years as a construction worker. One of China's leading thinkers and critics, he is the author of numerous essays, many of them pioneering ones, on literature, cinema and painting. He is the editor of several literature anthologies, especially of experimental literature. He has also written fiction and scripts for films. Li Tuo has been executive editor for the literary journals Jintian, and Beijing Literature. He lives in Beijing.
Andrea Lingenfelter
(Translator) Three Poems by Zhai Yongming
(Poetry/Monsoon 2019)
(Translator) Six Poems by Zhai Yongming
(Poetry/Monsoon 2009)
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Andrea Lingenfelter's translations include The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming (Northern California Book Award winner), Hon Lai Chu's The Kite Family, (NEA Translation Fellowship grantee), Li Pik-wah’s Farewell My Concubine and Candy by Mian Mian. Her translations have appeared in Manoa, Granta, Chinese Literature Today, Pathlight, Zoland Poetry Annual, Words Without Borders, Asian CHA, Two Lines, and elsewhere. Current translation projects include poetry by Wang Yin and Zhai Yongming’s Following Huang Gongwang Through the Fuchun Mountains, and Wang Anyi’s novel Scent of Heaven.
Lydia H. Liu
The Gift of a Living Past
(Essay/Monsoon 2019)
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Lydia H. Liu received a bicultural education in China and the United States. She completed her Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 1990. After that, she taught at UC Berkeley for more than a decade (1990-2002) where she eventually became the Catherine and William L, Magistretti Distinguished Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She also taught at the University of Michigan in 2004-2006 and held the chair of the Helmut Stern Professorship in Chinese Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature. Her research and publications have focused on cultural exchange in modern history and literature, the movement of words, ideas, and artifacts across national boundaries, political thought in translation, and the evolution of writing, textuality, and technology. She is the author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Her other books include The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004); Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (editor, 1999); Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (1995); and Writing and Materiality in China (co-edited with Judith Zeitlin, 2003). As a creative writer in Chinese, she published a book (in Chinese) called The Nesbit Code with Oxford University Press in Hong Kong which received the 2014 Hong Kong Book Award.
Julia Lovell
(Translator) The Maquiao Dictionary by Han Shaogong
(Prose/Monsoon 2019)
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Julia Lovell teaches modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature, The Great Wall: China Against the World and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China. Her several translations of modern Chinese fiction include Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao (winner of 2011 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature), Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars, and Lu Xun’s The Real Story of Ah-Q, and Other Tales of China. Recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize, she is currently working on a global history of Maoism.
Aditi Machado
Sentences/Sententiae
(Poetry / Winter 2016)
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Aditi Machado is the author of two chapbooks, Route: Marienbad (Further Other Book Works, 2016) and The Robing of the Bride (Dzanc, 2013), and a forthcoming first book of poems, Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017). Her translation of Farid Tali's Prosopopoeia will appear from Action later in 2016. Excerpts from these projects have recently appeared in FOLDER Magazine, Volt, The Capilano Review, Poor Claudia, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Aditi is from Bangalore, India, but currently lives in Denver, USA, where she is working on her doctoral dissertation. She edits poetry-in-translation for Asymptote.
Nathaniel Mackey
Song of the Andoumboulou
(Poetry / Winter 2018)
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Nathaniel Mackey is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Blue Fasa (New Directions, 2015); an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fifth and most recent volume is Late Arcade (New Directions, 2017); and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2018). He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and coeditor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil, 2017).
Claudio Magris
One Language, Many Cultures
(Special Issue: Style / Winter 2012)
Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon
The Self That Writes (Essay / Monsoon 2008)
Translated from the Italian by Nick Carter
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Claudio Magris, Germanist and critic, was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1939. He graduated from the University of Turin, where he went on to teach German Language and Literature from 1970 to 1978. He is currently a professor at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Trieste. He writes for the Corriere della Sera and for various other Italian daily papers and magazines. His numerous studies have helped promote an awareness in Italy of mid-European culture and of the literature of the Habsburg myth. A translator of Ibsen, Kleist and Schnitzler, his numerous published writings include Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna (1963), Wilhelm Heinse (1968), Lontano da dove, Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (1971), Dietro le parole (1978), Itaca e oltre (1982), Trieste. Un'identità di frontiera (together with Angelo Ara, 1982), L'anello di Clarisse (1984), Illazioni su una sciabola (1984), Danubio (1986), Stadelmann (1988), Un altro mare (1991), Microcosmi (1997), which won the Strega Prize in 1998, La Mostra (2001) and Alla cieca (2005).
Hope Masike
The Graveyard of Those Who Forgot to Live
(Poetry / Monsoon 2021)
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Hope Masike is a musician and dancer. She is known as "The Princess of Mbira" and her music has its roots both in traditional and modern African culture. She initially studied Fine Art at Harare Polytechnic.
Naiyar Masud
Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire
(Prose / Monsoon 2013)
Translated from the Urdu by M.U. Memon
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Naiyar Masud (1936-2017) was an Urdu short sotry writer and scholar. He was a receipient of the Padma Shri. Two volumes of his stories were translated into English by M.U. Memon, The Snake Catcher and Essence of Camphor.
Iz Mazano
Curves of Being
(Poetry / Monsoon 2021)
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Iz Mazano is a Zimbabwean poet who lives ucrrently in Western Massachsettes. His first book of poems will be published soon. It is inspired by the way technology shapes romantic relationships in the modern age.
John McAuliffe
Old Style
(Special Issue: Style/Winter 2012)
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John McAuliffe was born in 1973 and grew up in Listowel, Co Kerry and now lives in Manchester. He won the RTE Poet of the Future award in 2000 and received a major Arts Council Bursary for first book A Better Life, which was shortlisted for a Forward Prize in 2002; Next Door was published in 2007 and The Gallery Press will shortly publish his third collection, Of All Places, which has received a PBS Recommendation for Autumn 2011. He teaches poetry at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.
James Alan McPherson
Going Upto Atlanta
(Prose / Monsoon 2007)
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James Alan McPherson (1943-2016) was a short story writer and essayist, and a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973. His books include Hue and Cry, Railroad, Elbow Room, A Region not Home, and Crabcakes. He won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his short story collection, Elbow Room. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981. His work has appeared in twenty-seven journals and magazines, seven short-story anthologies, and The Best American Essays. In 1995, McPherson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been educated at Morris Brown College, Harvard Law School, The University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, and the Yale Law School. He has taught English at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Harvard, and also lectured in Japan at Meiji University and Chiba University. He was a professor of English at the University of Iowa.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Night Has Fallen
(Poetry / Winter 2020)
(Translator) The Man’s Woman by Viond Kumar Shukla
(Prose / Monsoon 2018)
(Translator) Twenty Rupees by Vinod Kumar Shukla
(Prose / Monsoon 2018)
Reshma Aquil of Daryabad
(Prose / Spring 2017)
(Translator) Four Poems by Vinod Kumar Shukla
(Poetry / Winter 2014)
Other Places
(Special Issue: The Past / Spring 2014)
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Arvind Krishna Mehrotra lives in Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayas. He is the author of seven previous books of poetry and two collections of essays. He is also the translator of Songs of Kabir and the editor of Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar and The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose. His Collected Poems is coming out from Shearsman Books in 2022.
Muhammad Umar Memon
(Translator) Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire by Naiyer Masud
(Prose / Monsoon 2013)
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Muhammad Umar Memon is Professor Emeritus of Urdu Literature and Islamic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a critic, short story writer, translator and editor of The Annual of Urdu Studies. He has translated half a dozen anthologies of Urdu fictional writing, the latest being Do You Suppose It’s the East Wind?
Siddartha Menon
from The Owl and the Laughing Buddha
(Manuscript Competition / Monsoon 2016)
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Siddhartha Menon works at the Rishi Valley School. He has published three collections of poems, Woodpecker (Sahitya Akademi, 2010), Writing Again (Folio, 2012) and The Owl and the Laughing Buddha (Poetrywala, 2016).
Hoshang Merchant
from Pound Pastiches
(Poetry / Winter 2017)
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Born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business-family in Bombay, India, Hoshang Merchant graduated second in his BA Class (1968) with a major in English and a minor in the culture of India. From his mother’s family he descends from a line of preachers and teachers. He holds a Master’s from Occidental College, Los Angeles. At Purdue University, he specialized in the Renaissance and Modernism. Anais Nin and he corresponded for four years. His book on Nin, In-discretions, earned him a Ph.D. from Purdue in 1981 and is published by Writers Workshop which has also published seventeen books of his poetry since 1989. He helped establish the Gay Liberation at Purdue. After leaving Purdue in 1975, Merchant attended the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Centre, Massachusetts, and lived and taught in Heidelberg, Iran and Jerusalem where he was exposed to various radical student movements of the Left. He has studied Buddhism at the Tibetan Library at Dharamsala, north India, as well as Islam in Iran and Palestine. Rupa and Co. published his book of poems Flower to Flame in 1992 in the New Poetry in India series. Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (Penguin, 1999), Forbidden Sex/Texts: New India’s Gay Poets (Routledge, 2009), Indian Homosexuality (Allied, 2010) and The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fiction (Penguin, 2012) are among his notable works. Presently, Merchant teaches Poetry and Surrealism at the University of Hyderabad and is unmarried by choice. Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant (OUP 2016) is his most recent work.
Jyotsna Milan
Neither Home Nor Stairs
(Poetry / Spring 2017)
Translated from the Hindi by Mantra Mukim
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Jyotsna Milan (1941–2014) was a Hindi poet and novelist, whose enigmatic writing style earned her cult status in the post-independence writing scene in India. Her language was not only marked by a freshness of form and diction, but its nuanced engagement with themes of female subjectivity and domesticity made it a necessary variant within the male-dominated modernism of the subcontinent. While having two masters degrees, in English and in Gujarati literature, she wrote and translated largely in Hindi. She was the editor of the monthly journal Ansuya, brought out by the women’s welfare organization Sewa, for more than twenty-two years, and translated a number of writers, including Gulam Muhammad Sheikh, Rajendra Shah, and Pavankumar Jain, from Gujarati. She published two novels in her lifetime, Apne Saath and A Astu Ka, the latter considered a landmark piece in Hindi literature. Apart from four short story collections, she also published two distinctive volumes of poetry, Ghar Nahi and Apne Aage Aage, which the current translation relies upon. A blog that compiles her own writings and photographs along with several other writings on her can be found here.
Subimal Misra
The Miraculous Phantom and His Beautiful Companion
(Manuscript Competition / Monsoon 2016)
Mohandas and Cut-Ball
(Prose / Monsoon 2013)
Translated from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy
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Subimal Misra is a Bengali writer and lives in Kolkata. A retired teacher, he taught for many years in a school near Sonagachi, Kolkata’s infamous red-light district. He has written exclusively for little magazines since 1967. Departing from conventional narrative form, as a self-professed disciple of filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Jean-Luc Godard, Misra sought to introduce film language into Bengali literature. His stories and novels are often referred to as ‘anti-stories’ and ‘anti-novels’. He is known to write ‘with venom instead of ink’, for his scathing social critique and the ‘planned violence’ on the reader. Misra is considered the only anti-establishment writer in Bengali literature, and the father of the experimental novel in Bengali. About thirty volumes of his stories, novels and essays have been published.
Monica Mody
Deep Ear to the Ground
(Poetry / Monsoon 2020)
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Monica Mody is the author of Kala Pani (1913 Press) and two cross-genre chapbooks. Her poetry also appears in Poetry International, The Indian Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, Boston Review, and Yes Poetry, among other places. She has been the recipient of the Nicholas Sparks Postgraduate Writer-in-Residence Prize from the University of Notre Dame, Naropa's Zora Neale Hurston Award, and the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing. Monica holds a PhD in East West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. She was born in Ranchi, India.
Sharmistha Mohanty
Crossing the Ganga
(Special Issue: The Past / Winter 2020)
An Island of Doubt
(Interviews / Monsoon 2012)
Mountains and Rivers
(Prose / Monsoon 2010)
Yellow Light
(Prose / Monsoon 2008)
(Translator) What is it That Flows Between Us by The Cybermohalla Ensemble
(Prose / Monsoon 2007)
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Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life, and Five Movements in Praise. Her most recent work is a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards. Her work has been published in several journals all over the world including Poetry, Granta, World Literature Today, and the Chinese journal Jintian. A chapbook made from a selection of poems from The Gods Came Afterwards appeared early 2020 from Ediciones Pen Presse in Spanish. The poems are translated by the acclaimed Argentinian poet, Mercedes Roffe. Mohanty is the founder-editor of Almost Island and the initiator of the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual international writers gathering held in New Delhi. She has taught for several years at the International Creative Writing MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong. She has also taught at the Creative Writing programme at Naropa University, set up by Allen Ginsberg. Mohanty has held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany (2002), at Ledig House in New York (2004), had residencies at the La Napoule Foundation for the Arts in France (2004), and Yaddo, USA, 2009. She is a recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the Indian Ministry of Culture.
Kobus Moolman
Something Beginning With
(Poetry / Winter 2014)
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An award-winning poet and playwright, educator and editor, Kobus Moolman teaches creative writing in the Department of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is regarded as one of South Africa’s leading lyric poets. He has published seven collections of poetry: Time like Stone (winner of the 2001 Ingrid Jonker Prize), Feet of the Sky, Separating the Seas, (winner of the 2010 South African Literary Award for Poetry), Anatomy (winner of the 2009 DALRO Prize), Light and After, Left Over, and his most recent, A Book of Rooms. He has also published two collections of his award-winning plays, Blind Voices (2007) and Full Circle (2007). He was the editor of the literary journal, Fidelities, from 1995 until 2007. In 2010 he edited and published, Tilling the Hard Soil: Poetry, Prose and Art by South African Writers with Disabilities. In 2013, he was the Mellon Writer in Residence, courtesy of Rhodes University in Grahamstown. At the end of 2013 he was awarded the Sol Plaatje European Union poetry award.
Fabio Morabito
Suits of Armor
(Prose / Monsoon 2008)
Translated from the Spanish by Geoff Hargreaves
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Fabio Morábito (1955) has written three books of poetry: Lotes baldíos (FCE, 1985), which won the Carlos Pellicer Prize, De lunes todo el año (Joaquín Mortiz, 1992), won the Aguascalientes Prize in 1991, and Alguien de lava (Era, 2002). These books have been featured in a volume La ola que regresa (FCE, 2006). He has also written three books of fiction, La lenta furia (1989, 2002), La vida ordenada (2000) and Grieta de fatiga (2006), which won the “Antonin Artaud” award in 2006 for its narrative. He has written a novel for children, Cuando las panteras no eran negras (Siruela, 1996). He has translated the complete works of Eugenio Montale and Torquato Tasso's Aminta (UNAM, 2001). His works have been translated into German, English, French, Portuguese and Italian.
Anna Deeny Morales
(Translator) Inherence by Mirta Rosenberg
(Special Issue: Latin American Poetry / Winter 2019)
(Translator) Reply of the Dervish by Ida Vitale
(Special Issue: Latin American Poetry / Winter 2019)
(Translator) Have You Measured the Time of Your Heart? by Diana Bellessi
(Special Issue: Latin American Poetry / Winter 2019)
(Translator) In Front of the Mirror by Isabel de los Ángeles Ruano
(Special Issue: Latin American Poetry / Winter 2019)
(Translator) River Mouth by Rosabetty Muñoz
(Special Issue: Latin American Poetry / Winter 2019)
(Translator) The Identity of Certain Fruits by Amanda Berenguer
(Poetry / Winter 2017)
(Translator) Bruno Bends Over, Falls by Raúl Zurita
(Poetry / Monsoon 2016)
(Translator) Preparing Paradise by Raúl Zurita
(Prose / Monsoon 2015)
(Translator) Dreams for Kurosawa by Raúl Zurita
(Poetry / Winter 2014)
(Translator) from Floating Lanterns by Mercedes Roffé
(Poetry / Winter 2014)
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Anna Deeny Morales is a dramatist, translator of poetry, and literary critic. Original works for contemporary dance, theater, and opera include La straniera (1997); Tela di Ragno (1999–2002); Cecilia Valdés (2018); and La Paloma at the Wall (2019). Her one-act opera libretto, ¡ZAVALA-ZAVALA!: an opera in v cuts, recently commissioned by the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and composer Brian Arreola, will debut in 2021. A 2018 National Endowment for the Arts recipient for the translation of Tala by Gabriela Mistral, Deeny Morales has translated works by Raúl Zurita, Mercedes Roffé, Alejandra Pizarnik, Nicanor Parra, Amanda Berenguer, Malú Urriola, and Marosa di Giorgio, among others. She received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at Harvard University and Dartmouth College. She currently teaches at Georgetown University, and her book manuscript, Other Solitudes, considers transamerican dialogues on consciousness and poetry throughout the last century.
Tosa Motokiyu
The Strange Account of ‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’
(Prose / Monsoon 2007)
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Tosa Motokiyu (along with collaborators Ojiu Norinaga and Okura Kyojin) first came to prominence in the mid-1990s as a purported translator of the Japanese poet and survivor of the Hiroshima massacre, Araki Yasusada. When Yasusada was revealed as an elaborate fiction, Motokiyu presented himself as the author of the works in question, and subsequently asserted that “Motokiyu” itself was merely the pen name of an author whose legal will requested that his true name never be revealed. As with the transcribed “tape-essay” here, Motokiyu's works locate themselves in a truly international sense of the avant-garde, and often take apart the idea of authorship in ways that are both playful and dark. He was believed to have died of cancer in 1996, but the tape essay included here carries some surprising new news. An introduction to the Yasusada controversy can be entered via Jacket Magazine.
Tinashe Muchuri
from Allow Me to Laugh
(Poetry / Monsoon 2021)
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Tinashe Muchuri is a writer with passion in creative industries. He writes about the arts and gives an ear to indigenous knowledge systems and enjoys researching around the Shona people’s culture. He is the writer of an anti-novel titled Chibarabada, a children's story book, Auntie Mazvita, and Shona creative resource book, ZvipfuyonevanaVazvo. He is finalizing his second novel ZvavanhuHerevo! and also aggregating Shona proverbs in their variations, variants and digging for where they originated (reasons why they were created).
Aryanil Mukherjee
Code Memory
(Poetry / Winter 2017)
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Aryanil Mukherjee is a bilingual poet, essayist, translator, screenwriter and editor who has authored fourteen books of poetry and essays in two languages. Anthology appearances include: The Harper-Collins Book of Indian Poetry in English (2011), The Literary Review Indian Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson University, 2009); Indivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), La Pared de Agua, a Spanish anthology of contemporary Bengali poetry (Madrid: Olifante Press, 2011), etc. Aryanil edits Kaurab, a Bengali language e&m-zine of experimental poetry and poetics. A PhD in Aerospace Engineering, he works as an engineering mathematician in Cincinnati, USA.
Mantra Mukim
Listening for Thresholds: Kesarbai Kerkar and a Step Beyond
(Prose / Monsoon 2020)
A Taste for Secrecy
(Prose / Monsoon 2018)
(Translator) Neither Home Nor Stairs by Jyotsna Milan
(Poetry / Spring 2017)
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Mantra Mukim is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of English & Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. His essays have appeared in Caravan, Asymptote, New Union, Almost Island and Humanities Underground.
Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh
Brahmarakshas
(Poems / Winter 2011)
from In the Dark
(Poems / Winter 2011)
Translated from the Hindi by Nikhil Govind
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Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh was born almost the exact moment of the Russian Revolution--in November 1917, and his socialist leanings were to remain strong throughout his life, sometimes getting him into trouble with the government. He belonged to a Maharashtrian family but wrote mostly in Hindi, a sign of the vastness, fluidity and permeability of the Hindi-speaking area and the Hindi language itself--his brother became an influential literary figure in Marathi, a sign of the breadth and tolerance of linguistic interactions across regional cultures that has an urgent relevance today. Muktibodh began to publish young and was one of the poets included in the influential first Tar Saptak (roughly translatable as "the higher, more difficult octave") collection. This collection, published in 1943, is often regarded as a turning point in Hindi literary modernism for its freer and more diverse rhythms and themes. This recognition did not help Muktibodh economically and his life was spent working briefly in varied jobs including the airforce, as print and radio journalist, and mostly as teacher in various schools in small towns scattered throughout central and northern India--Shujalpur, Ujjain, Indore, Jabalpur, Nagpur, Benaras as well as, briefly, in the larger cities of Calcutta, Bangalore and Bombay. Perhaps these travels sharpened his ear to the wider, more abruptly spoken and colloquial Hindi that his poems sometimes contain. Equally, his Masters in Hindi from Nagpur University gave his work historical depth--his literary criticism of the older Hindi poet Jayashankar Prasad's work carve out a newer understanding of the modern subject pruned of the cosmological-nationalist posture that Prasad's work had assumed at the crest of the freedom struggle in the twenties and thirties. Muktibodh retained much of the Sanskritized vocabulary of Prasad--but his subject, emerging out of the delirium of the World War and Partition, was marked by the fifties sentiment of imminent nuclear cataclysm.
Ottilie Mulzet
(Translator) Beyond the Cordons by Gábor Schein
(Poetry / Monsoon 2015)
Introduction to the Legend of Mother Green Tārā
Special Issue: The Past / Spring 2014)
(Translator) The Legend of Mother Green Tārā
(Special Issue: The Past / Spring 2014)
(Translator) He Rises at Dawn by László Krasznahorkai
(Prose / Monsoon 2013)
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Ottilie Mulzet translates from Hungarian and Mongolian. In 2014, she won the Best Translated Book Award for her translation of László Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below. Upcoming translations include Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens by László Krasznahorkai (Seagull, 2016) and The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbely (HarperCollins, 2016).
Rosabetty Muñoz
River Mouth
(Special Issue: Latin American Poetry / Winter 2019)
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny Morales
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Rosabetty Muñoz Serón (born 9 September 1960) is a Chilean poet and professor who is linked to the cultural movements Chaicura from Ancud, Aumens from Castro and Índice and Matra from Valdivia. She is a recipient of the Pablo Neruda Award and the Poetry Altazor Award.
Ranjani Murali
from Soars a Face
(Manuscript Competition / Monsoon 2016)
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Ranjani Murali is a Chicago-based writer and artist. She received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University. She currently teaches college-level literature and writing courses. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Fine Arts Work Center. Ranjani won the Srinivas Rayaprol poetry prize in 2014 and the inaugural Almost Island manuscript prize in 2015. Her first book of poems is forthcoming. Her work has appeared in Phoebe, Eclectica, Cricket Online Review, Word Riot, and elsewhere.
Togara Muzanenhamo
Gumiguru
(Special Issue: The Past / Spring 2014)
from Spirit Brides
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
Five New Poems
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
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Togara Muzanenhamo was born in Lusaka, Zambia to Zimbabwean parents. He was raised on his family’s farm thirty miles south of Harare, and educated in Paris and The Hague. He has worked as a journalist, screenplay editor and copywriter. His poems have appeared in journals in Africa, Europe and the U.S. His first collection of poems, Spirit Brides, was published by Carcanet Press.
Mariko Nagai
(Translator) from Water Cat: Chapter 1 by Haruki Amanuma
(Prose / Winter 2011)
(Translator) from Water Cat: Chapter 2 by Haruki Amanuma
(Prose / Winter 2011)
(Translator) from Water Cat: Chapter 3 by Haruki Amanuma
(Prose / Winter 2011)
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Mariko Nagai is the author of Histories of Bodies (Red Hen Press, 2005), the winner of the 2005 James Saltman Poetry Award; and Georgic, the winner of the 2009 GS Sharat Chandra Prize and forthcoming from BkMk Press in 2010. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Yaddo, Djerassi, and UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists. She is Assistant Professor and Director of Writing Programs at Temple University, Japan Campus, in Tokyo.
Karthika Naïr
Of Myths and Men
(Special Issue: The Past / Winter 2020)
from Until the Lions
(Poetry / Monsoon 2015)
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Karthika Naïr is the author of several books, including the invented fable The Honey Hunter, illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet, and the principal scriptwriter of several dance productions, including the multiple-award-winning DESH (2011), choreographer Akram Khan’s dance solo. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining of the Mahabharata in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live! Award for fiction, was shortlisted for the 2016 Atta Galatta Prize for Fiction and highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes. Akram Khan adapted one chapter of the book into a dance show, also called Until the Lions, winner of the 2016 Tanz Award for Outstanding Production. Another adaptation of the book, this time for opera, has been commissioned by Opéra national du Rhin in France. The dance shows she has scripted and co-scripted have been staged at venues across the world, such as the Palais des Papes (Avignon), Esplanade (Singapore), Sadler’s Wells (London), Théâtre de la Ville and La Villette (Paris) and L.G. Arts Center (Seoul). Naïr’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals including Granta, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Magazine, Poetry International, Indian Literature, The Wolf, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets and the Forward Book of Poetry 2017. She is a 2012 Sangam House Fellow, a 2013 Toji Foundation Fellow and was awarded a Villa Marguerite Yourcenar Fellowship in 2015. Her latest book is Over and Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris (2018), a travelogue in verse, written with Mumbai-based poet Sampurna Chattarji, and illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet and Roshni Vyam. Also a dance enabler, Naïr’s closest associations have been with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet as executive producer of works like Babel(words), Puz/zle and Jalet's Les Médusées, a site-responsive series of performative evenings at the Louvre Museum, and as co-founder of Cherkaoui's company Eastman.
Sawako Nakayasu
(Translator) from For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide
(Poems / Winter 2011)
(Translator) from Castle in the Air — A Dream Journal by Ayane Kawata
(Poems / Winter 2011)
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Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. Her books include Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009), Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (Quale Press, 2005), and So we have been given time Or, (Verse Press, 2004). Books of translations include Time of Sky//Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata (Litmus Press, 2010) and For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide (New Directions, 2008) which won the 2009 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent, as well as Four From Japan (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, 2006) featuring four contemporary poets, and To the Vast Blooming Sky (Seeing Eye Books), a chapbook of poems by the Japanese modernist Chika Sagawa. Her translation of Sagawa's Collected Poems is forthcoming in 2013 from Canarium Books. She has received fellowships from the NEA and PEN, and her own work has been translated into Japanese, Swedish, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese.
Ashis Nandy
Studying Genocide After Fifty Years
(Essay/ Monsoon 2020)
An Age of Genocide
(Essay/Monsoon 2019)
Open Pasts, Open Futures
(Essay / Monsoon 2009)
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Ashis Nandy is one of India's most significant thinkers and public intellectuals. His work spans the fields of political psychology, sociology, nationalism, public conscience and culture. He is the author of many books, some of them seminal in Indian thought, such as The Intimate Enemy and The Savage Freud. For many years he was a Fellow and a Director of the Centre for Developing Societies in New Delhi. He was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007, and the Hans Kilian Award in 2019.
Padma Narayanan
(Translator) The Story of Nanmarankottai by Imayam
(Prose / Monsoon 2018)
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Padma Narayanan is the translator of several books of literary fiction from the Tamil, including La. Sa. Ramamritham's Apeetha (Oxford University Press, 2014), Aadhavan’s I, Ramaseshan (New Horizons / Indian Writing, 2008), Indira Parthasarathy's Poison Roots (Amaryllis, 2014), and Ramamritham's The Stone Laughs and Atonement (Katha Press, 2005). Her translations have also appeared in Agni (Boston), Words Without Borders, Caravan (New Delhi), and elsewhere. She lives in Varanasi.
Vivek Narayanan
Mr. Subramanian
(Poetry / Winter 2009)
22 Hours
(Poetry / Winter 2009)
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Vivek Narayanan is Co-Editor of Almost Island. He was born in India to Tamil-speaking parents and grew up in Zambia. He did undergraduate and graduate work in the United States, taught at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and moved back to India in 2000. His first book of poems, Universal Beach, was published in 2006. A new, revised US edition of that book was published in 2011, and a second volume, Mr.Subramanian, is also forthcoming. Some of Narayanan's poems and short stories can be sampled online at places like The International Literary Quarterly, Pratilipi, Agni, Manchester Review, Blackbox Manifold, and elsewhere, as well as offline in recent anthologies like The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East,Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton).
Narayanan is also interested in exploring different approaches to reading and performing poetry, and in collaborative experiments that explore technology, physical space, movement, site-specific poetry and audience interaction. In addition to his role at Almost Island, he works with Sarai-CSDS, a New Delhi-based organisation that brings together visual artists, social scientists, creative writers, public intellectuals and others to reflect inventively on new and old media forms and the contemporary global city.
Tariro Ndoro
The People in My Pelt
(Poetry / Monsoon 2021)
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Tariro Ndoro is a Zimbabwean writer. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University. Her poetry, essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New African Poets Anthology, Cyphers, Fireside Quarterly, Oxford Poetry, and SAND Literary Journal. Tariro has been shortlisted for the BN Poetry Prize, the DALROPoetry Prize and the Intwasa Short Story Prize; and was selected for Iowa University's International Writing Programme.
Christopher Nealon
The Shore
(Poetry / Monsoon 2018)
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Christopher Nealon is Professor of English, and from 2015-18 was Chair of the English Department, at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two books of criticism, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), and three books of poetry: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009) and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He lives in Washington, DC.
Maria Negroni
from Riddance (Andanza)
(Poetry / Winter 2009)
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny Morales
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María Negroni was born in Argentina. She holds a PhD in Latin American Literature (Columbia University, New York). She has published numerous books of poetry including : de tanto desolar (Tierra Firme, Buenos Aires 1985), per/canta (Tierra Firme, Buenos Aires 1989), La jaula bajo el trapo (Tierra Firme, Buenos Aires 1991; Editorial Cuarto Propio, Santiago de Chile 1998), Islandia (Monte Avila Editores, Caracas 1994), El viaje de la noche (Editorial Lumen, Barcelona 1994), Diario Extranjero (Ediciones La Pequeña Venecia, Caracas 2000; Maison des Ecrivains Etrangers, St.Nazaire 2001. Islandia and Night Journey have appeared in English by Station Hill Press (2000) and Princeton University Press (2002) respectively. She has also published three books of essays: Ciudad Gótica (Bajo la Luna Nueva, Rosario 1994, second edition 2007), Museo Negro (Grupo Editorial Norma, Buenos Aires 1999), and El Testigo Lúcido (Beatriz Viterbo Editoras, Rosario 2003), as well as two novels El sueño de Ursula (Editorial Planeta/Seix Barral, Buenos Aires 1998) and La Anunciación (Seix-Barral, Buenos Aires 2007), and a book-object, Buenos Aires Tour, in collaboration with Argentine artist Jorge Macchi. She has translated several poets from French and English. Her book La pasión del exilio, which includes ten American women poets of the 20th Century has just been published by Bajo la luna, Buenos Aires 2007. She has also translated Louise Labé (Sonetos, Lumen, Barcelona, 1998); Valentine Penrose (Hierba a la Luna y otros poemas, Ediciones Angria, Caracas 1995); Georges Bataille (Lo arcangélico, Fundarte, Caracas 1995), H.D. (Helena en Egipto, Ediciones Angria, Caracas 1994); Charles Simic (Totemismo y otros poemas, Alción, Córdoba 2000), and Bernard Noël (Contra-muerte y otros poemas, Alción, Córdoba 2004) and edited La morada imposible (containing Susana Thénon's work, Corregidor Buenos Aires 2005, and La maldad de escribir, an Anthology of 20th Century Latin American Women Poets, Editorial Igitur, Barcelona 2005. María Negroni has received several fellowships: a Guggenheim Foundation (1994), a Rockefeller Foundation (1998), the Fundación Octavio Paz (2001), The New York Foundation for the Arts (2005), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation (2007). Her book Islandia received the PEN Award for best book of poetry in translation, New York 2001. She currently teaches Latin American Literature at Sarah Lawrence College.
Philip Nikolayev
(Translator) To the Teacher’s Wooden Sandals by Adi Shankara
(Poetry / Winter 2017)
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Philip Nikolayev the poet of Letters from Aldenderry (Salt) and other verse collections, has new volumes forthcoming from MadHat (USA) and Poetrywala (India) in 2018. He is coeditor-in-chief of FULCRUM, a serial anthology of poetry and criticism from throughout the English-speaking world.
Tejaswini Niranjana
(Translator) A Spare Pair of Legs by Jayant Kaikini
(Prose / Winter 2017)
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Tejaswini Niranjana won the Central Sahitya Akademi Prize for her translation of M.K. Indira’s Phaniyamma (1989) and the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Prize for her translation of Niranjana’s Mrityunjaya (1996). She has also translated Pablo Neruda’s poetry and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Kannada. Her translations into English include Vaidehi’s Gulabi Talkies (2006). She grew up in Bangalore, and has studied and worked in Mumbai. She is currently professor of cultural studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
Sarah O’Brien
(Translator) from Heliotropes by Ryoko Sekiguchi
(Poetry / Winter 2011)
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Sarah O'Brien is a graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She grew up on a small farm in Ohio and has lived in Cape Town, Paris, and various places in the United States. Her first book of poems, Catch Light (Coffee House Press, 2010), was a National Poetry Series winner in the US. She is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is opening a bakery.
Philippa Page
(Translator) The Clear Marble Slab by Luisa Futoransky
(Poetry / Winter 2020)
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Philippa Page is a Lecturer in Hispanic Literature and Translation at Newcastle University, U.K. She is author of the monograph Politics and Performance in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Film and Theatre (Tamesis, 2011) and co-editor of the volumes The Feeling Child: Politics, Childhood and Affect in Contemporary Latin American Literature and Film (Lexington, 2018) and Entre/telones y pantallas. Afectos y saberes en la performance argentina contemporánea (Libraria), in press. Her translations have been published in the journals Confluencia, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, and Poetry International.
Pascal Petit
(Translator) Six Poems by Zhai Yongming
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
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Pascal Petit is a French born British poet. She has several poetry collections which include The Huntress, The Treekeeper’s Trail, Mama Amazonica. Four of her poetry books were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. She has translated several poets from the Chinese, including Yang Lian and Wang Xiaoni.
Terry Pitts
Five Novels, Five Photographs
(Prose / Spring 2017)
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Terry Pitts is a retired art museum director and curator. He is the author of a number of books, exhibition catalogs, and essays, mostly on the history of photography. He has curated more than fifty exhibitions for museums in the US and Europe. He studied literature and library science at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and has an MA in art history from the University of Arizona. Since 2007, he has written the blog Vertigo, where he writes about contemporary literature and photography. He lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Javaid Qazi
(Translator) Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire by Naiyer Masud
(Prose / Monsoon 2013)
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Javaid Qazi holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance Drama and has been writing fiction for over four decades. His collection, Unlikely Stories, was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. His stories have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Chelsea, Toronto South Asian Review, Kansas Quarterly and Sequoia. He has also translated and published the stories of well-known Urdu authors such as Intizar Husain, Naiyer Masud and Ahmad Hamesh. He was born near Lahore in 1947. Over the last forty years, he has taught English literature in various universities in the U.S., at Manas University in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic, and at Girne American University in the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus. He has also worked as a technical writer in the computer industry. He is also a painter. He lives in San Jose, California with his wife.
Sara Rai
(Translator) The Man’s Woman
(Prose / Monsoon 2018)
(Translator) Twenty Rupees
(Prose / Monsoon 2018)
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Sara Rai works in Hindi, Urdu and English. Her fiction includes Ababeel ki Uraan (1995), Biyabaan Mein (2005) and Cheelvali Kothi (2010). Books edited / translated by her include The Golden Waist-Chain (1992), Imaging the Other (1999) and Hindi Handpicked Fictions (2003).
V. Ramaswamy
(Translator) The Miraculous Phantom and His Beautiful Companion by Subimal Misra
(Manuscript Competition / Monsoon 2016)
(Translator) Mohandas and Cut-Ball by Subimal Misra
(Prose / Monsoon 2013)
(Translator) Cooking Up a Tale by Manoranjan Byapari
(Prose / Winter 2021)
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V. Ramaswamy lives in Kolkata and is engaged in a multi-volume project of translating the short fiction of the Bengali writer, Subimal Misra. The Golden Gandhi Statue from America was published in 2010, and the second volume, Wild Animals Prohibited, was published in 2015. He was a recipient of the Sarai Fellowship for urban non-fiction writing in 2013, and the Toji Cultural Foundation residency in 2015. The translator gratefully acknowledges the Ledig House writers’ residency for enabling the translation.
Nisha Ramayya
Two for Alice
(Poetry / Winter 2018)
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Nisha Ramayya's poetry pamphlets Notes on Sanskrit (2015) and Correspondences (2016) are published by Oystercatcher Press. With Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil, she co-authored Threads (2018), a creative-critical pamphlet published by clinic. She is a member of the Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK research group and teaches Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.
Mani Rao
For Ever, From Ever
(Special Issue: The Past / Winter 2020)
(Translator) A Collection of Seasons: from Kalidasa’s Ṛtusaṃhāram
(Special Issue: The Past / Spring 2014)
from Ghostmasters
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
from Gods R Us
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
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Mani Rao is a poet, translator and independent scholar.Mani has ten poetry collections including Sing to Me (Recent Work Press Australia, 2019), New & Selected Poems (Poetrywala India 2014), Echolocation (Math Paper Press Singapore, 2014; Chameleon Press Hong Kong, 2003) and Ghostmasters (Chameleon Press Hong Kong, 2010). Her books in translation from Sanskrit are Bhagavad Gita (Fingerprint India 2015; Autumn Hill Books USA 2010), and Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader (Aleph Books India, 2014). Her latest book Living Mantra— Mantra, Deity and Visionary Experience Today (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) is an anthropology of mantra-experience among tantric practitioners in south India. Translations of her poems have been published in Latin, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, French and German. She did an MFA in Creative Writing from UNLV (2010), and a PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University (2016).
D. Venkat Rao
Moving in the Double Bind
(Special Issue: The Past / Winter 2020)
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D. Venkat Rao teaches at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. In addition to books in English and Telugu he has published several articles in national and international journals. His recent work is Critical Humanities from India: Contexts, Issues, Futures (Routledge, 2018), and his other publications include Cultures of Memory in South Asia (Springer, 2014), In Citations: Readings in Area Studies of Culture (1999), a translation of Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy into Telugu (2005). Earlier he translated into English a Telugu intellectual autobiography called The Last Brahmin (2007, 2012, 2017). He has a full-length work on literary-cultural criticism in Telugu entitled, Saamskritika Chaanakyaalu. His areas of interest include literary and cultural studies, image studies, epic traditions, visual cultures, comparative thought, translation, and mnemocultures. He has designed several courses interfacing areas of culture, technology and literary and cultural studies. He is the editor of the Routledge Series on Critical Humanities Across Cultures (forthcoming).
Srinivas Rayaprol
Portraits of America: Five Poems
(Poetry / Monsoon 2019)
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Srinivas Rayaprol was born in 1925 in Secunderabad. He studied in Nizam College, Hyderabad and at the Banaras Hindu University before going to Stanford University from where he obtained an M.S. in Civil Engineering. While in the U.S., he started writing poetry in English and interacted closely with writers like William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, and James Laughlin. His correspondence with Williams has been published as Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams (2018), edited by Graziano Krätli. His books of poetry include Married Love and Other Poems (1972) and Selected Poems (1995).
A. Rawlings
From The North Suite
(Special Issue: Style / Winter 2012)
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a.rawlings is an animal, mineral, plant, person, place, or thing. As a poet, arts educator, and interdisciplinarian, rawlings has presented and/or published work in North America, Europe, and Australia. Her first book, Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006), received an Alcuin Award for Design and was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award; the book is being translated into French. Google Wikipedia and PennSound for further rawlings goodness.
Srikanth Reddy
Voyager
(Prose / Monsoon 2007)
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Srikanth Reddy’s first collection of poetry, Facts for Visitors (UC Press, Berkeley) was widely acclaimed in its "attempt to reconstruct a history of our kind as if from some as-yet unknown vantage point" (Jorie Graham) and also received the 2005 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, The Canary, Fence, Grand Street, and jubilat. Reddy is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Rodrigo Rey Rosa
The Proof
(Prose / Monsoon 2007)
The Truth
(Prose / Monsoon 2007)
Translated from the Spanish by Paul Bowles
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Rodrigo Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala in 1958; his fiction has been translated into English (by Paul Bowles), French, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, Greek, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian and Japanese. He is the author of four short story collections and eight novels. Some of his titles include The Good Cripple, The Pelcari Project, Dust on Her Tongue and Ningún lugar sagrado. He lives and works in Guatemala.
Jennifer Robertson
The Girl From Ipanema: Three poems
(Poetry / Monsoon 2020)
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Jennifer Robertson is a poet, critic and an independent curator based in Bombay. Her debut manuscript won the Editor's choice award instituted by The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. Her critical essays and book reviews have appeared in The American Book Review, Scroll, Mint, and Vayavya. Her poems have been published by the Emma Press, UK, The Missing Slate and Domus, and have been widely anthologised in the Global Anthology of Anglophone Poetry published by Poetry Foundation, USA, the 40 Under 40: Anthology of Post-Globalisation Poetry published by Poetrywala, India, and the Sahitya Akademi's anthology of young poets. She has convened the literary chapter for the PEN All-India Centre at Prithvi Theatre and was the literary curator for the 'Celebrate Bandra Festival'.
Mercedes Roffe
from Floating Lanterns
(Poetry / Winter 2014)
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny Morales
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Mercedes Roffé is one of Argentina’s leading poets. Widely published in Latin America and Spain, some of her books have appeared in translation in Italy, Quebec, Romania, and England. Her poetry collection, La ópera fantasma (Madrid/México, Vaso Roto, 2012) was chosen one of the best books of 2012 by two major Mexican newspapers. Her book Las linternas flotantes (2009) translated as Floating Lanterns by Anna Deeny will be published in 2015 by Shearsman Books. Her most recent poetry collection is entitled Carcaj: Vislumbres (Madrid/México, Vaso Roto, 2014). She is the founding editor of Ediciones Pen Press (www.edicionespenpress.com), a New York-based independent press dedicated to the publication of contemporary Spanish-language poets as well as poets of other languages in Spanish translation. She is the co-editor of Colección Letra T, a new series launched by Editorial Amargord of Madrid, devoted to the publication of poetry and literary essays in Spanish translation. Roffé holds a diploma in Modern Languages from the University of Buenos Aires, and a Ph.D. from New York University. She lives in NYC and is frequently invited to read from her work at international poetry festivals and academic settings around the world. Mercedes Roffé was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2001) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2012).
Mirta Rosenberg
Inherence
(Special Issue: Latin American Poetry / Winter 2019)
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny Morales
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Mirta Rosenberg was born on October 7, 1951 in Rosario, Argentina, and passed away on June 28, 2019, in Buenos Aires. Her volumes of poetry include Pasajes (1984); Madam (1988); Teoría sentimental (1994); El arte de perder (1998); El árbol de palabras: obra reunida 1984–2006 (2006); El paisaje interior (2012); El arte de perder y otros poemas (2015); Cuaderno de oficio (2016); and Bichos, sonetos y comentarios, co-authored with Ezequiel Zaidenwerg (2017). Rosenberg has translated poetry and essays by Katherine Mansfield, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Dereck Walcott, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, W.H. Auden, James Laughlin, Seamus Heaney, and Anne Talvaz. In collaboration with Daniel Samoilovich, she translated Henry IV by William Shakespeare. Her poetry has been widely anthologized as well as translated into the German, French, and English.
In 1990 Rosenberg founded the prestigious publishing house Bajo la luna. She was also the founding director of Extra / lecturas para poetas, and a member of the editorial board of Diario de poesía. Rosenberg was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2003; the Konex Prize in 2004 for her achievements in literary translation; and, in 2013, she received the José Pedroni Province Poetry Prize for her book El paisaje interior.
Gustave Roud
from Air of Solitude
Translated from the French by Sean T. Reynolds & Alexander Dickow
(Prose / Winter 2021)
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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.
Souradeep Roy
(Translator) from Buddhist Inscriptions
(Poetry / Monsoon 2018)
(Translator) from Bonolata Sen
(Poetry / Winter 2016)
It will come back: an elegy
(Poetry / Monsoon 2022)
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Souradeep Roy is a poet and translator. His latest publication is the poem "A Brief Loss of Sanity" published in The Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing, Vol. 6, edited by Meena Kandasamy and Eunice de Souza. He currently lives in Delhi and is part of the editorial collective of the Indian Writers' Forum, where he manages their two sites, the Indian Cultural Forum and Guftugu.
Sumana Roy
How to Console a Dying Plant
(Poetry / Spring 2017)
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Sumana Roy’s first book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-fiction, was published in India in February 2017. Her poems have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Drunken Boat, The Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She lives in Siliguri in India.
Isabel de los Angeles Ruano
In Front of the Mirror
(Special Issue: Latin American Poetry / Winter 2019)
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny Morales
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Isabel de los Ángeles Ruano was born in Chiquimula, Guatemala, in 1945. She is a poet, novelist, journalist, and teacher. The 1954, US-backed military coup d’état forced Ruano to flee to Mexico with her family. The coup would eventually lead to the Guatemalan Civil War that lasted from 1960 to 1996. The family managed to return to Guatemala in 1957, and Ruano received her teacher’s diploma from the Educación Primaria Urbana in Chiquimula. In 1966, Ruano went back to Mexico and published her first book, Cariátides. Upon her return to Guatemala in 1967, she worked as a journalist, and in 1978, she received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Latin American Languages and Literatures at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala.
Ruano’s published works include Cariátides (1966); Cantares ¿Quién dijo cantares? (1979); Canto de amor a la ciudad de Guatemala (1988); Torres y Tatuajes (1988); Los del viento (anthology, 1999); Café express (2002; 2008); Versos dorados (2006); Poemas grises (2010); and Los muros perdidos (2013). Her unedited novels include Los soliloquios de María Ixcamparic; Reprisse de los inmortales; and Carta de una bruja a una condesa medieval. For over thirty years, Ruano has struggled with mental illness, and Guatemala City’s neighborhood, Justo Rufino Barrios, zona 21, has become her home. She was awarded the prestigious Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature by the Ministry of Culture in 2001.
Jaime Saenz
The Night
(Poetry / Monsoon 2008)
Translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson
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Poet and novelist Jaime Saenz (1921-1986) is considered the greatest Bolivian writer of the twentieth century. His poetry is apocalyptic, transcendent and hallucinatory. He lived his whole life in La Paz, Bolivia, seldom venturing out of the city. It is that indigenous culture of the place which features so prominently in all his writings. His life was defined by an intense experience of alcoholism and struggle. He sought God in unlikely places: slum taverns, alcoholic excess, and the street. Saenz was nocturnal. Occult in his politics, unashamedly bisexual, secretive in his leadership of a select group of writers, Saenz mixed the mystical and baroque with the fantastic, the psychological and the symbolic. He once stole a leg from a cadaver and hid it under his bed. On his wedding night he brought home a panther.
Arun Sagar
A Walk on the Ridge
(Poetry / Winter 2016)
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Arun Sagar’s first collection of poems, Anamnesia, was published by Poetrywala (Mumbai) in 2013. He lives and works in Sonipat.
SAID
Psalms
(Poetry / Monsoon 2013)
Translated from the German by Mark S. Burrows
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SAID, a native of Iran, has lived in Germany since 1965. He has published eight volumes of poetry, several collections of essays, children’s books, and radio-plays; several of his books have appeared in English including Landscapes of a Distant Mother (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Widely acknowledged as one of the leading poets writing in Germany, he is the recipient of numerous distinguished awards, including most recently the Hermann Kesten Medal of PEN-Germany, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the Literature Prize of the Society of Free German Authors. This volume first appeared as Psalmen, published by C. H. Beck Publishers (Munich, 2001).
Tomaž Šalamun
Six Poems
(Poems / Winter 2011)
Translated from the Slovenian by Michael Biggins
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Tomaž Šalamun lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is currently teaching spring semester 2011 at Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas. His recent books translated into English are Woods and Chalices (Harcourt 2008), Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, second edition 2008) and There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair (Counterpath Press, 2009). His Blue Tower is due from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Fall 2011.
Mukta Sambrani
from Broomrider’s Book of the Dead
(Poems / Winter 2011)
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Born and raised in India where she taught English and worked as a freelance journalist, Mukta Sambrani moved to the US in 1999, where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her first book of poems, The woman in this room isn't lonely was published by Writer's Workshop, Calcutta in 1997. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Verse, Em Literary, Cipactli, Fourteen Hills, Hyphen Magazine, Laundry Pen, The Scribbler, Poetry Chain, Fulcrum, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, Sixty Indian Poets (edited by Jeet Thayil), and an anthology of contemporary Indian women's poetry published by Sahitya Akademi: We Speak in Changing Languages. She is the recipient of the 2003 Audre Lorde creative writing award and an honorable mention for the Starcherone prize. She lives in Berkeley, California and teaches English at a High School in neighboring Oakland.
Vilas Sarang
The Boat People
(Prose / Winter 2016)
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Vilas Sarang (1942–2015) was one of the most significant modernist Indian writers and wrote remarkable short stories, poems, novels, and criticism in his first language Marathi as well as in English. Born in Karwar and educated in Mumbai and at Indiana University, he taught English literature in various countries and was head of the English department in Mumbai University for several years. His short stories have been collected in The Women in Cages. He also published four novels – In the Land of Enki, The Dinosaur Ship, Tandoor Cinders, and The Dhamma Man – and two collections of poetry – A Kind of Silence and Another Life.
Shveta Sarda
(Translator) On Writing by The Cybermohalla Ensemble
(Special Issue: Style / Winter 2012)
(Translator) What is it That Flows Between Us by The Cybermohalla Ensemble
(Prose / Monsoon 2007)
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Shveta Sarda works at Sarai-CSDS and is a translator and writer.
K. Satchidanandan
Poems
(Poetry / Winter 2009)
Translated by the author
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K.Satchidanandan is one of the pioneers of modern poetry in Malayalam. He has twenty-two collections of poetry, and several collections of critical essays and interviews. He also has three collections of essays in English. He was Professor of English at Christ College, University of Calicut, Kerala, and editor of Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi(The National Academy of Letters) and later its Chief Executive. He lives in New Delhi.
Viswanatha Satyanarayana
from Tigerform
(Manuscript Competition / Monsoon 2016)
Translated from the Telegu by Satya Gummuluri and Srikant Gummuluri
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Viswanatha Satyanarayana (1895-1976) is one of the foremost twentieth century writers in the Telugu language. He is renowned for a versatile and prolific body of work including poetry, novels, essays, dramas and short stories, informed by his scholarship of Sanskrit and classical Telugu, his traditional values, and his studies in subjects ranging from English literature to psychology, epistemology to aesthetics. He adhered to a strict traditional literary style, and displayed a command over classical Telugu which is unparalleled in modern times. Satyanarayana is a Jnanpith laureate and a Padma Bhushan awardee. His prose opus, Veyipadagulu has been translated into Hindi by former Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.
Michael Scharf
Outdoor Miner
(Poetry / Winter 2016)
An Unendurable Age: Notes on John Ashbery’s “A Boy”
(Special Issue: Style / Winter 2012)
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Michael Scharf’s most recent poetry collection is For Kid Rock / Total Freedom. His critical essays have been published in Poetry, Boston Review, Poets & Writers, Jacket, and other publications. From 1997-2006 he served as poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly. He is based in Shillong and New York.
Gábor Schein
Beyond the Cordons
(Poetry / Monsoon 2015)
Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet
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Highly acclaimed as a poet, a dramatist, a children’s author, and a novelist, Gábor Schein lives in Budapest, where he is a professor at the Hungarian Literary History Institute of Eötvös Loránd University. He has written nine collections of poetry and three novels. English translations of his writing have appeared on www.hlo.hu and B O D Y.
Irwin Allan Sealy
The Past is Always With Us
(Special Issue: The Past / Winter 2020)
Crocs: Excerpts from Asoca
(Prose / Monsoon 2020)
from Zelaldinus
(Poetry / Spring 2017)
China Fragments
(Special Issue: The Past / Spring 2014)
from Zelaldinus
(Poetry / Winter 2009)
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Irwin Allan Sealy is the author of Zelaldinus, a collection of poems from Almost island, and most recently Asoca: a sutra. Penguin published the 30th anniversary edition of his novel The Trotter-nama last year.
Ryoko Sekiguchi
from Heliotropes
(Poetry / Winter 2011)
Translated from the Japanese from Sarah O’Brien
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Ryoko Sekiguchi was born in Tokyo in 1970. At an early age she began to write poetry in both Japanese and French, and when she was eighteen she received the Tokyo Literature Prize of Cahiers de La Poésie Contemporaine. Since 1997 she has lived in Paris, where she studied Art History at the Sorbonne. Three years later she completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo. Today she teaches at various institutes including INALCO, the Paris Research Centre for Oriental Languages and Civilisations.
Sekiguchi's poetry, in its structure and form, breaks from Japanese tradition. Her poems are striking in their composition, because Sekiguchi rejects established formats and textual dispositions, as well as creating a visual, poetic space. Her first volume of poetry Cassiopée Péca (1993) was originally printed in A2-Format. The typographical composition, in the form of variedly arranged text blocks - or labyrinths of lines -, generates a wealth of meaning, which challenges the reader's faculty of interpretation, and turns it into a fundamental element of the poetry. The synthesis of various symbols - an ubiquitous theme in Sekiguchi's work - also contributes to this effect. In this way, elements of different languages are found fused together within the same sentence, and that which is written is sometimes accompanied by a graphical pattern - as in Calques (Engl: Tracing Paper) for example, a poetry collection from 2001. This volume is composed of texts from her Japanese works (com)position (1996) and Hakkouseï Diapositive (2000; Engl: Illuminating Slides), which Sekiguchi translated herself as she does with many of her own poems. Sekiguchi has also translated the works of Gôzô Yoshimasu, Yoko Tawada and French authors including Pierre Alferi, Anne Portugal, and Atiq Rahimi.
Sekiguchi has received numerous grants from the Japanese Foundation for Writing Arts and the Centre National du Livre, amongst others. Her poems have been translated into English, Korean, Swedish, and Arabic.
Haider Shahbaz
(Translator) Half Woman by Khalida Hussain
(Prose / Winter 2020)
(Translator) I Was Healed in a Plaster Shell by Mirza Athar Baig
(Prose / Winter 2017)
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Haider Shahbaz is doing a PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is the translator of Mirza Athar Baig's Hassan's State of Affairs (HarperCollins India, 2019). He was the 2016-17 Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. He lives in Lahore.
Ravi Shankar
Three Collaborative Poems
(Poetry / Monsoon 2015)
The Geology and Physics of Style
(Special Issue: Style / Winter 2012)
New Poems
(Poetry / Winter 2009)
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Ravi Shankar is Poet-in-Residence and Associate Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, Chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust and the founding editor of Drunken Boat. He has published or edited seven books of poems, including Deepening Groove, Radha Says, Seamless Matter, Voluptuous Bristle, Wanton Textiles, and Instrumentality. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.), called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize, been featured in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, appeared on the BBC and NPR, and has performed his work around the world. He is currently on the faculty of the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong.
Shrilal Shukla
This is Not My Home
(Prose / Monsoon 2015)
Translated from the Hindi by Prashansa Taneja
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Shrilal Shukla (1925-2011) was one of the pre-eminent writers of Hindi literature in the post-Independence era. His novels, short stories and essays present an astutely satirical view of life in India after Independence. Shukla was a Provincial Civil Services (PCS) officer for the state government of Uttar Pradesh and later became an IAS officer. His most famous work is the novel Raag Darbari, a masterpiece of social and political satire set in rural India. Shukla was awarded the Padma Bhushan and the Jnanpith Award for his services to Hindi literature.
Vinod Kumar Shukla
The Man’s Woman
(Prose / Monsoon 2018)
Translated from the Hindi by Sara Rai and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Twenty Rupees
(Prose / Monsoon 2018)
Translated from the Hindi by Sara Rai and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Four Poems
(Poetry / Winter 2014)
Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
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Vinod Kumar Shukla (b.1937) is a modern Hindi poet, novelist and short-story writer. His works include the novels Naukar ki Kameez (which has been made into a film by Mani Kaul) and Deewar Mein Ek Khirkee Rahati Thi (A Window Lived in a Wall), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999. He lives in Raipur, Chhattisgarh.
Venkat Raman Singh Shyam
from Finding My Way
(Prose / Monsoon 2016)
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Venkat Raman Singh Shyam is an artist who lives in Bhopal. Born into a Pardhan Gond family in Sijhora, near the Kanha forest in eastern Madhya Pradesh, his hunger for art led him to do every kind of job from working as a truck assistant to being a cycle rickshaw-wallah in Delhi. Mentored by his illustrious uncle Jangarh Singh Shyam, Venkat has since shown his work all over the world. Most recently he participated in the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) is the Queensland Art Gallery. Finding My Way is his first book, a result of his collaboration with S. Anand.
Medha Singh
Viscera: Four Fragments
(Poetry / Monsoon 2020)
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Medha Singh is a poet, editor and translator. She took her M.A. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and Sciences Po, Paris. She has authored two books. Her first collection of poems is Ecdysis (2017, Paperwall). The second is a work of translation from the French, I Will Bring My Time: Love Letters by S.H. Raza (Vadehra Art Gallery, 2020). She was nominated for the Toto Funds the Arts award in 2019. She has published widely between India, US, UK and Europe. She is on the editorial board at Freigeist Verlag, Berlin. She has also delivered a TEDx talk on effective arguing. She tweets @medhawrites.
Ari Sitas
Hooding
(Poetry / Monsoon 2018)
from Slave Trades
(Poetry / Monsoon 2018)
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Ari Sitas is a writer, creative socialist thinker and activist who has been described as one of the key intellectuals of the post-1980s generation in South Africa. His many books of poems include Tropical Scars (1989), Shoeshine and Piano (1992), Slave Trades (2000), The RDP Poems (2004), Around the World in 80 Days, the India Section (2013), Rough Music: Selected Poems, 1989-2013 (2013) and The Vespa Diaries (2018).
Zhou Sivan
from Zero Copula
(Poetry / Monsoon 2015)
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Zhou Sivan was born in Malaysia and lived in Singapore and New York. He currently resides in Chicago and is writing a dissertation on the transnational and multilingual networks of socialist realism and modernism in the literary archive of Malayan communism. His poems appear in anthologies and journals such as Lana Turner, Asymptote, The Salt Anthology of New Writing, and The Columbia Review. His collection of sonnets, Zero Copula, is forthcoming in 2015 from Delete Press.
Sushil Sivaram
from All This is Night
(Manuscript Competition / Monsoon 2016)
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Sushil Sivaram’s poems have appeared in New Quest – A Quarterly Journal of Participative Inquiry, REAL - Regarding Arts and Letters, Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry and Retort Magazine/Bareknuckle Poet. He is currently in a Ph.D. program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Rahul Soni
As If It Had Never Been Written
(Special Issue: The Past / Winter 2020)
(Translator) Five Poems by Dhoomil
(Poetry / Monsoon 2015)
(Translator) Copper Worms by Bhuvneshwar
(Play / Monsoon 2013)
(Translator) 21 Poems from Magadh by Shrikant Verma
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
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Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator. He has edited an anthology of Hindi poetry in English translation, Home from a Distance (2011), and translated Shrikant Verma’s collection of poetry, Magadh (2013), Geetanjali Shree’s novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet (2013), a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry A Name for Every Leaf (2016), and Pankaj Kapur’s novella Dopehri (2019).
Aleš Šteger
Three Prose Poems
(Poetry / Winter 2018)
Translated from the Sloveninan by Brian Henry
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Slovenian writer Aleš Šteger has published seven books of poetry, three novels, and two books of essays. A Chevalier des Artes et Lettres in France and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry book, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, the 2007 Rožanc Award for the best Slovenian book of essays, and the 2016 International Bienek Prize. His work has been translated into over 15 languages, including Chinese, German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. He has published four books in English: The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 as a Lannan Foundation selection and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award; Berlin, a collection of lyric essays, appeared from Counterpath Press in 2015; Essential Baggage, a book of prose poems, appeared from Equipage in England in 2016; and the novel Absolution, which appeared in England in 2017. He also has worked in the field of visual arts (most recently with a large scale installation at the International Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India), completed several collaborations with musicians (Godalika, Uroš Rojko, Peter N. Gruber), and collaborated with Peter Zach on the film Beyond Boundaries.
Cole Swenson
Five Poems
(Poems / Winter 2011)
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Cole Swensen is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry, most recently Greensward (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) and Ours (University of California Press, 2008), which was supported by a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her 2004 title, Goest, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and other volumes have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, Sun and Moon's New American Writing Award, and the National Poetry Series. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the 2009 Norton anthology American Hybrid. She's also a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism; her translation of Jean Fremon's The Island of the Dead won the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation, and she has received translation grants from the Association Beaumarchais and French Centre du Livre. The founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to experimental French poetry translated by English-language poets, she co-directs the annual Reid Hall Translation Seminar in Paris. She was the writer-in-residence at Yale's Beinecke Library in 2007-2008 and has served as a visiting writer at the Pratt Institute, Brown University, Temple University, Grinnell College, and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and divides her time between Iowa, Washington DC, and Paris.
Todd Swift
Poems Composed at Cambridge
(Poetry / Winter 2018)
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Todd Swift, Montreal-born but now also British, is the editor or co-editor of numerous global anthologies, including Carcanet’s Modern Canadian Poets. He is author of ten full collections of poetry, including Seaway: New & Selected Poems, from Salmon, Ireland. His poems have appeared in many leading journals in America, Australia, Britain, Canada and Ireland, such as Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Review, Poetry London, PRISM International, The Globe and Mail, Jacket, and New American Writing. He was Oxfam GB’s poet-in-residence, based in Marylebone, 2004-2012. He was Writer-in-Residence, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, England, 2017-18. He founded Eyewear Publishing in 2012 and is its chief patron. He has a PhD from the University of East Anglia (UEA); and is married to an Irish barrister. He has many nieces and nephews; and loves cats.
George Szirtes
Foreign Laughter, Foreign Music
(Essay / Monsoon 2012)
In the Seventh District of the City
(Prose / Monsoon 2010)
(Translator) from Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
(Prose / Monsoon 2008)
Prose Poems
(Prose / Monsoon 2007)
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George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. His family were refugees from the 1956 Uprising and settled in England where he studied sciences at school, trained as an artist and finished up being a poet and translator. His first book, The Slant Door won the Faber Prize in 1980. His twelve books since have won various awards, most recently the T S Eliot Prize for Reel (2004). He has been translating from the Hungarian since his first return in 1984 and has published over a dozen books of translated prose, verse and drama, that have won a number of prizes. He has edited a number of anthologies of Hungarian writing and written a book on art as well as a number of libretti and musicals. He reviews for The Guardian, The Times and other papers and teaches part time at the University of East Anglia. He is married to the artist Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he has published Budapest: Image, Poem, Film (2006).
Prashansa Taneja
Translator) This is Not My Home by Shrilal Shukla
(Prose / Monsoon 2015)
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Prashansa Taneja studies literature and foreign languages at Bennington College in Vermont, USA. Her book reviews have appeared in the Guardian UK, The Millions and the Sunday Guardian. Currently, she is working on an English translation of Upendranath Ashk's memoir of his supposed enmity with Saadat Hasan Manto, My Enemy: Manto.
Gene Tanta
from Pastoral Emergency
(Poems / Winter 2011)
from Unusual Woods
(Poems / Winter 2011)
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Gene Tanta was born in Timisoara, Romania and lived there until 1984, when his family immigrated to the United States. Since then, he has lived in DeKalb, Iowa City, New York, Oaxaca City, Iasi, Milwaukee, and Chicago. He is a poet, visual artist, and translator of contemporary Romanian poetry. His two poetry books are Unusual Woods and Pastoral Emergency: both are excerpted from in this issue of Almost Island. Tanta earned his MFA in Poetry from the Iowa's Writers' Workshop in 2000 and his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2009 with literary specialization in twentieth-century American poetry and the European avant-garde. His journal publications include: EPOCH, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Laurel Review. Tanta also has had two collaborative poems with Reginald Shepherd anthologized in Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Currently, he is working on two anthologies while teaching post-graduate creative writing online for UC Berkeley Extension.
Tendekai Tati
Historical Records
(Poems / Monsoon 2021)
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Tendekai Tati is a Zimbabwean slam poet who is based in Harare. He is regarded as a contemporary poet with a youthful and urban voice. Known by his stage moniker: Madzitatiguru, Tendekai has been involved in a number of events including local Zimbabwean festivals such as the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA), Shoko Festival and Intwasa Arts Festival. He made his performance debut at the House of Hunger Poetry slam hosted by the Bookcafe in 2011. Internationally, Madzitatiguru participated in the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2018 (EIBF), toured Denmark in 2014 as a teaching artist, performed in The Kumusha Harare-Detroit exchange 2013, as well as Poetry Africa in 2012. He writes and performs predominantly in urban Shona, but occasionally borrows from the Queen’s language too.
Anand Thakore
Miniatures
(Poetry / Winter 2018)
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Born in Mumbai in 1971, Anand Thakore grew up in India and in the United Kingdom. He has spent most of his life in Mumbai. His published collections of poetry include Waking In December (2001), Elephant Bathing (2012), Mughal Sequence (2012), Selected Poems (2017) and Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls (2017). A Hindustani classical vocalist by training, he has devoted much of his life to the study, performance, composition and teaching of Hindustani vocal music. He received musical instruction for many years from Ustad Aslam Khan, Pandit Baban Haldankar and Pandit Satyasheel Deshpande. He is the founder of Harbour Line, a publishing collective, and of Kshitij, an interactive forum for musicians. He holds an MA in English Literature and is the recipient of grants from The Ministry of Human Resource Development and The Charles Wallace India Trust. He lives in Mumbai and divides his time between writing, performances, and teaching music. His fourth collection of verse, entitled Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls, was recently shortlisted for The Jayadeva National Poetry Award.
Tristan Tzara
from Midis gagnés
(Poetry / Winter 2017)
Translated from the French by Heathr Green
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Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) is best known as the co-founder of the Dada movement and author of many of its most influential poems and manifestoes. After the peak of the Dada movement, he had a brief and contentious affiliation with Surrealism and worked as a prolific lyric poet for the rest of his life. Tzara was born and raised in Romania, where, because of his Jewish identity, he could not own land or hold a passport. In 1915, he moved to Zurich and began to write in French and perform in the Cabaret Voltaire. In 1919, Tzara brought Dada to Paris, where he lived almost continuously until his death, writing and working as an art and literary critic, activist, humanitarian, diplomat, journalist, and playwright.
Snehal Vadher
from Uncertain Curtains
(Poetry / Monsoon 2012)
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Snehal Vadher studied Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at universities in the U.K. He teaches literature at school level and conducts creative writing workshops in Bombay. Some of his short short fiction can be found online at nthposition and his poems have appeared in issues of Nether magazine. He maintains a blog at wordpress where he writes about poetry and other literary things.
Russell Scott Valentino
(Translator) from Buick Riviera by Miljenko Jergovic
(Prose / Monsoon 2010)
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Russell Scott Valentino is a translator and scholar based in Iowa City, Iowa. He has published eight books and numerous essays and short translations of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from Italian, Croatian, and Russian. He is the publisher of Autumn Hill Books and Editor of The Iowa Review. He teaches in the University of Iowa's Translation Workshop.
Shrikant Verma
21 Poems from Magadh
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
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Shrikant Verma (1931-86) was a central figure in the "Nai Kavita" movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh, he did his Masters in Hindi from Nagpur University in 1956, then moved to New Delhi, where he worked in journalism and politics. Verma served as special correspondent for "Dinman", a major Hindi periodical, from 1966 to 1977. In 1976, he was elected a member of the Rajya Sabha on a Congress (I) ticket, and served as an official and spokesman of the party through the late 1970s to the early 80s. He published two collections of short fiction, a novel, a travelogue, literary interviews, essays and five collections of poetry, of which the most important are "Jalasaghar" (1973) and "Magadh" (1984). The latter, a groundbreaking work that remains one of the best-known books in contemporary Hindi poetry. Verma was a visitor at the Iowa International Writing Program twice (1970-71 and 1978), and won the Tulsi Puraskar (1976), the Kumaran Asan Award, and the Sahitya Akademi Award (posthumously, for "Magadh", in 1987).
Ida Vitale
Reply of the Dervish
(Special Issue: Latin American Poetry / Winter 2019)
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny Morales
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Ida Vitale was born in 1923 in Montevideo, Uruguay. As a student of literature, she was inspired by the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, a fascination for nature, and the works of José Bergamín. During the Uruguayan military dictatorship, she lived in exile in Mexico from 1974 to 1984 with her second husband, Enrique Fierro, a poet and professor. They returned to Uruguay for a few years and eventually settled in Austin, Texas. In 2018, Vitale returned to the city of her birth. Vitale was a centripetal force of the Uruguayan literary and artistic movement known as the “Generación del ’45” [Generation of ‘45]. She has written numerous volumes of poetry and prose, including La luz de esta memoria (1949); Palabra dada (1953); Cada uno en su noche, poesía (1960); Oidor andante (1972); Fieles (1982); Sueños de la constancia (1988); Léxico de afinidades (1994); Procura de lo imposible (1998); Un invierno equivocado (1999); Reducción del infinito (2002); De plantas y animales (2003); El abc de byobu (2004); Trema (2005), and in 2017, Poesía reunida, a volume of complete works.
Vitale was conferred a doctor honoris causa by the Universidad de la República Oriental de Uruguay in 2010. She has received various awards, including the Octavio Paz Prize (2009); the Carlos Monsiváis Medal for Cultural Merit (2010); the Alfonso Reyes Prize (2014); the Reina Sofía Poetry Prize (2015); the Federico García Lorca Poetry Prize (2016); in France, the Max Jacob Prize (2017); in Guadalajara, the Romance Languages and Literature Prize; and, in Spain, the Cervantes Prize (2018).
Anne Waldman
Heft
(Poetry / Monsoon 2020)
Che Guevara Came To Me In A Dream
(Poetry / Monsoon 2008)
Eleven Faces One Thousand Arms
(Poetry / Monsoon 2008)
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Anne Waldman is an author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics. She is an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement, and has been connected to the Beat movement and the second generation of the New York School. Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman (1975), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), the multi-volume Iovis project (1992, 1993, 1997), and Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born (2016). She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church In-the-Bowery, working there for twelve years. She also co-founded with Allen Ginsberg and Diane diPrima the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics at Naropa and continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary/oral archive and curate the celebrated Summer Writing Program. Some of her performance work may be accessed on Charles Bernstein's Penn Sound.
Gina Wang
(Translator) from The Messenger’s Letter by Sun Ganlu
(Prose / Monsoon 2010)
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Bei Dao was born in 1949. He spent eleven years working as a construction labourer. He is one of China's most significant poets, and has lived in exile since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His work has been widely translated into English. His books in translation include The August Sleepwalker (1990), Old Snow (1991), Forms of Distance (1994), Landscape Over Zero (1996), and Unlock (2000). He is one of the founder editors of the literature journal Jintian, begun in 1978. Jintian published a new literature which expressed the importance of the imagination and of individual perception, long suppressed in the Chinese context. It was banned in 1980, and was later revived by Bei Dao in exile, and he continues to edit it today. He currently lives in Hong Kong.
Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg
(Translator) 1985 by Li Tuo
(Essay / Monsoon 2009)
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Anne-Wedell-Wedellsborg is a Sinologist and professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Aarhaus Univeristy in Denmark
Eliot Weinberger
(Translator) Poems by Bei Dao
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
The Rhinoceros
(Prose / Monsoon 2007)
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Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Works on Paper, Outside Stories, Karmic Traces, and, most recently, An Elemental Thing. His political articles are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. He is the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry and World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions. Among his translations are the Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges Selected Non-Fictions (in UK: The Total Library), Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, and Unlock by Bei Dao.
Magnus William-Olsson
Philological Time
(Special Issue: The Past / Spring 2014)
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Magnus William-Olsson (b. 1960, Stockholm, Sweden), poet, literary critic, and translator, has published nine volumes of poetry, four books of essays on poetry, and two books of autobiographical tales. He has translated poetry from ancient and modern Greek (Sappho and Cavafy), Spanish (Antonio Gamoneda, Alejandra Pizarnik and Gloria Gervitz), Portuguese (Paulo Henriques Britto) and Danish (Pia Tafdrup) into Swedish. His collected poems, titled Ögonblicket är för Pindaros ett litet rum i tiden (The Moment for Pindar is a Small Space in Time) was published 2006. A book of twenty-seven sonnets followed in 2010. In 2011 came a book on poetry and poetics, Läsningen föregår skriften - poesins aktualitet (Reading Precedes Writing - the Actuality of Poetry). His poems have been translated into more than fifteen languages. In 2013, a new collection of poetry, Homullus absconditus, was published. William-Olsson is also the editor-in-chief of two series of books, W&W - Internationell poesi (the most prestigious series in Sweden for international poetry) and Ariel/Litterär Kritik, a series of Scandinavian essays. He has been awarded several prizes, among others the Karl Vennbergs pris (2005), the Bellmanpriset (2010) and the Gunnar Ekelöfpriset (2011).
Austin Woerner
(Translator) Five Poems by Ouyang Jianghe
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
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Austin Woerner holds a degree in East Asian Studies from Yale. He is a translator of contemporary Chinese poetry and fiction. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the UC Riverside Department of Comparative Literature.
Xi Chuan
On Reading: Two Poems
(Special Issue: India-China Dialogues / Monsoon 2019)
Doubting Yourself and the World at Once
(Prose / Winter 2014)
What the Tang Did Not Have
(Special Issue: Style / Winter 2012)
Style Comes as a Reward
(Special Issue: Style / Winter 2012)
All translations, from the Chinese, by Lucas Klein
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Xi Chuan 西川 (penname of Liu Jun 刘军) was born in Jiangsu in 1963 but grew up in Beijing, where he still lives. One of contemporary China’s most celebrated poets, having won the Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001) and the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize (2003), he is also one of its most hyphenated littérateurs—teacher-essayist-translator-editor-poet, and has been described by American writer Eliot Weinberger as a “polymath, equally at home discussing the latest American poetry or Shang Dynasty numismatics.” A graduate of the English department of Beijing University, where his thesis was on Ezra Pound’s Chinese translations, he is currently professor Creative Writing at Beijing Normal University. He was recently awarded Sweden’s Cikada Prize.
Jeffrey Yang
Langkasuka
(Special Issue: The Past / Winter 2020)
Sea Birth See Day
(Poetry / Winter 2018)
Reading, Cave, Athos
(Poetry / Winter 2016)
The Pond in the Lake
(Special Issue: The Past / Spring 2014)
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Jeffrey Yang is the author of Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium. The poems in this issue from "Langkasuka" will be published in his forthcoming book Line and Light.
Zhai Yongming
Three Poems
(Special Issue: India-China Dialogues / Monsoon 2019)
Six Poems
(Poetry / Monsoon 2009)
Translated from the Chinese by Andrea Lingenfelter
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Zhai Yongming 翟永明, born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. She then worked as a physics institute engineer until 1986. She began publishing poetry in 1981. She has travelled extensively throughout Europe, and has also lived in the United States for nearly two years, during which she toured the nation by car. Her poetry has received numerous awards, including the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize, the Best Ten Women Poets of China Award, the Italian Ceppo Pistoia International Literary Prize, the 31st Annual Northern California Book Awards and the Chinese Media Award. She was also invited to attend the San Francisco International Poetry Festival in the United States in 2009. Among her many poetry collections are Woman; Above All Roses; The Collected Poems of Zhai Yongming; Call It All; Fourteen Plain Songs; and Interlinear Spaces. Her poetry has been translated into English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and German. She has also published six collections of essays and literary criticism. She lives in Chengdu, where she owns and operates the art and literary bar, “White Nights”.
Raúl Zurita
Bruno Bends Over, Falls
(Poetry / Monsoon 2016)
Preparing Paradise
(Prose / Monsoon 2015)
Dreams for Kurosawa
Poetry / Winter 2014)
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny Morales
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Raúl Zurita Canessa (Santiago de Chile, 1950) is one of Latin America’s foremost and celebrated poets. He studied Civil Engineering at the Universidad Santa María de Valparaíso. Along with other artists, in 1979 he founded CADA, Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, an art action group dedicated to the creation of public and political art that would resist the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. His literary works include Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), El paraíso está vacío (1984), Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), Canto de los ríos que se aman (1993), La vida nueva (1994), Poemas militantes (2000), El día más blanco (2000), INRI (2003), Mi mejilla es el cielo estrellado (2004), Los poemas muertos (2006), Los países muertos (2006), Las ciudades de agua (2007), Poemas de amor (2007), Zurita/ In Memoriam (2007) and Zurita (2011). In 1982 he directed the sky writing of the poem “The New Life” over Queens, New York, and in 1992 he bulldozed “ni pena ni miedo” (“no shame no fear”) into the Desert of Atacama. Zurita has been awarded the Premio Pablo Neruda, the Premio Nacional de Literatura de Chile, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. From 1990-1995, he served as the Chilean cultural attaché to Italy. His works have been translated into English, German, Russian, Italian, Swiss, Chinese, Bengali, Turkish and Hindi. He now lives in Santiago and teaches literature at the Universidad Diego Portales.
Maria do Carmo Zanini
(Translator) from Beyond the Wall by Régis Bonvicino
(Poetry / Spring 2017)
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Maria do Carmo Zanini is the author of RPGs (role-playing games) and a translator.
Whitney DeVos
(Translator) The Character
by Sergio Chejfec
(Poetry / Winter 2021)
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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.