And There Will Be Singing: An Anthology of International Writing

Notes on Contributors

ATEF ABU SAIF is a Palestinian writer liv­ing in Gaza. He has published six novels. His novel A Suspended Life was shortlisted for the 2015 Arab Booker Prize. He edited a collection of short stories from Gaza titled The Book of Gaza, which includes one of his own pieces. His account of the Israeli attacks against Gaza in 2014 was published in Eng­lish under the title The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire. Abu Saif holds a PhD in political science and teaches at the University of Al-Azhar in Gaza.

AMAL AL JUBOURI, a native of Iraq, is the author of five collections of poetry, including Wine from Wound;, Words, Set Me Free!; Enheduanna, Pirestess of Exile; 99 Veils ; and Hagar Before the Occupaion, Hagar After the Occupation, which is also available in English. In 1997, she took asylum in Germany, after having been listed first on Uday Hussein’s list of renegade Iraqi writers, and was the first Iraqi writer to return to Baghdad, two days after the fall of the regime. The founder and editor-in-chief o al-Diwan, the first and only Arab German literary magazine, she was president of the East-West Diwan German Cultural Foundation, and acted as Cultural Counsel for the Yemen Embassy in Berlin.

A. JAMES ARNOLD is the author of Modernism and Negitude: The Poetry and Politics of Aime Cesaire (Harvard, 1981), the editor of Cesaire’s Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82 (Virginia, 1990), co-translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, and the lead editor of the Paris edition of Cesaire’s literary works.

Alone or with Nicole Ball, DAVID BALL has translated twenty books of prose and poetry. His Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology 1927-1982 won the MLA’s award for outstanding literary translation in 1995 and his Jean Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years: 1940-1944 won the French-American Foundation 2014 prize for translation (non-fiction). A past president of ALTA (the American Literary Translators Association), he was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques by the French Republic in 2017. David is a Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Smith College.

ORTSION BARTANA was born in Tel Aviv in 1949. He’s a professor who’s taught Hebrew literature at various universities in Israel. He’s been the chairman of the Hebrew Writers’ Association and president of PEN Israel. He has published eleven collections of poetry, five collections of short stories, two novels, four books of criticism, and five books of literary research. His work has been translated into several languages and published in literary magazines and anthologies around the world. He has won the Prime Minister’s Award, Bernstein Award, and Brenner Award.

POLINA BARSKOVA, born in Leningrad in 1976, published her first collection of po­ems in 1991; her poems have been translated into English for literary journals, antholo­gies, and two solo volumes: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press, 2010) and The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems (Melville House Press, 2011). The Present selection of transla­tions by Catherine Ciepiela comes from the forthcoming anthology Relocations: Poetry by Maria Stepanova, Anna Glazova and Po­lina Barskova (Zephyr Press, 2013). Barskova teaches Russian literature at Hampshire Col­lege, in Amherst, MA.

ERIC M. B. BECKER is a writer, translator, and award-winning journalist from St. Paul, Minnesota. His translations of Brazilian writer Edival Lourenço have appeared in Machado de Assis Magazine. A candidate for the MFA at Queens College-CUNY, he is the recipient of a 2014 Louis Armstrong House Museum Residency and assistant managing editor at the world literature journal Asymptote.

GIOVANNA BELLESIA is professor of Italian Language and Literature at Smith College. Her research has centered on modern Italian women writers and migration studies. Along with her colleague Victoria Offredi Poletto, she has translated several short stories, Dacia Maraini’s Un clandestine a bordo, and two novels: Cristina Ali Farah’s Madre piccolo and Gabriella Ghemandi’s Regina di fiori di perle.

JOHN BERGER (1926–2017) was the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including Hold Everything Dear, Here Is Where We Meet, the Into Their Labours trilogy, G., and Ways of Seeing. His book Bento’s Sketchbook wwas published by Pantheon in September 2011.

In addition to the short story collection The Little Red Book, ALEXANDRA BERKOVÁ published four novellas (Magoria or: A Tale of Great Love; The Trials and Tribulations of the Devoted Scoundrel; Dark Love; A Banal Story) before her untimely death in 2008. She also worked in television and radio, and influ­enced a generation of writers as an instruc­tor at the Czech Literary Academy.

ALEXANDER BOOTH lives in Rome. He is the recipient of a 2012 PEN Translation Fund grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler. Other poems and translations have recently appeared in Asymptote, BODY, FreeVerse, Ko­nundrum, and Modern Poetry in Translation.

Born in Warsaw under the Communist regime, STANISLAW BOROKOWSKI emigrated to Vienna as a child and has lived there ever since. Having worked for years as a newspaper distributor, he began publishing and performing his poetry and slowly gained a reputation in his adopted homeland for his irreverent, humorous, revelatory texts. His work has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies and his first volume of poems, der halbherzige anarchist und andere texte, was released in 2007. In addition, his blog Briefe an Michail Gorbatschow enjoys a cult following among German-language readers.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS BORY is one of the world’s preeminent visual littérateurs. In addition to the influential anthology of verbo-visuals he edited in 1968, Once Again, which was published in the U.S. by New Directions, his own literary/artistic output is vast and various; of books, he’s turned out dozens since the early Sixties, most recently Looping (Redfoxpress, 2011)

PETER BUSH’S translation of Teresa Solana’s The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Sto­ries is out this fall from Bitter Lemon. He is currently finishing his translation of Barcelona Tales and the biography of a Catalan composer residing in the USA since 1956, Leonardo Balada: A Transatlantic Gaze. He is well into Josep Pla’s Salt Water and Quim Monzo’s El perqué de tot plegat.

NANCY NAOMI CARLSON has authored six titles, including translations of poems by Abdourahman Waberi, a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. A recipient of an NEA literature translation fellowship, Carl­son has published translations in APR, crazy­horse, FIELD, New England Review, Massachu­setts Review, and Prairie Schooner.

AIMÉ CÉSAIRE (1913 –2008) was a Francophone and French poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature. His works include Une Tempête and Devours sur le colonialism (Discourse on Colonialism), an essay describing the strife between the colonizers and the colonized. His works have been translated into many languages.

HAYAN CHARARA is the author of three poetry books, most recently Something Sinster. He edited an anthology of contemporary Arab-American poetry, Inclined to Speak, and his children's book The Three Lucys received the New Voices Award Honor. He teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston.

CATHERINE CIEPIELA writes about and translates modern Russian poetry. She is the author of The Same Solitude, a study of Ma­rina Tsvetaeva’s epistolary romance with Boris Pasternak, and co-editor with Honor Moore of The Stray Dog Cabaret, a book of Paul Schmidt’s translations of the Russian modernist poets. She teaches at Amherst College.

MIA COUTO was born in Beira, Mozambique in 1955. Couto is the author of more than twenty-five books of fiction, essays and poems. His novels and short story collections have been published in twenty languages. Two of his novels have been made into feature films and his books have been bestsellers in Africa, Europe, and South America. In 2002, a committee of African literary critics named his novel Sleepwalking Land one of the twelve best African books of the twentieth century. His novels have been awarded major literary prizes in Mozambique, Portugal,  Brazil and Italy. Mia Couto lives with his family in Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as an environmental consultant and a theatre director.

ERRI DE LUCA is an Italian novelist, essayist, poet, and translator. 

SUZANNE DRACIUS is an award-winning writer from Martinique, whom the French Cultural Minister has called “one of the great figures of Antillean letters.” Dracius’s poems, short stories, novels, and plays emphasize Mar­tinique’s complex cultural history, filled with slavery, sugar cane, métissage(the blending of two distinct elements, in either a biological or cultural sense), and erupting volcanoes. Her sophisticated language is filled with imagina­tive word play, Latin, slang, and Creole.

JONATHAN DUNNE has translated more than twenty books of poetry and fiction into English from the Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician and Spanish languages. Among the authors he has translated are Álvaro Colomer, Alicia Giménez-Bartlett, Manuel Rivas and Enrique Vila-Matas. He has edited and translated a bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature in two volumes, as well as a supplement of Contemporary Galician Poets for the Winter 2010 issue of Poetry Review (available for free download on the UK Poetry Society’s website). He has written about translation and connections between words in two books: The DNA of the English Language (2007) and The Life of a Translator (2013). He directs the publishing house Small Stations Press, which produces two series of Galician literature in English: Galician Classics (including Galician Songs by Rosalía de Castro) and Galician Wave (young adult fiction).

LAURA CESARCO EGLIN is the author of three collections of poetry: Llamar al agua por su nombre, Sastrería, and Los brazos del saguaro. A selection of poems from Sastrería was translated collaboratively into English with Teresa Williams and subsequently published as the chapbook Tailor Shop: Threads. Cesarco Eglin recently published the chapbook Occasions to Call Miracles Appropriate. She has translated works of Colombian, Mexican, Uruguayan, and Brazilian authors into English. Her poems and translations have appeared in journals in the US, UK, Spain, Mexico, and Uruguay. She is the co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books.

NAJAT EL-HACHMI was born in 1979 in Beni Sidel in the Rif Valley. She emigrated from Morocco to Catalonia with her mother at the age of eight and was brought up in the town of Vic. She has a degree in Arabic Language and Literature from Barcelona University. Her first novel, The Last Patriarch, won the Ramon Llull Prize in 2008 and the Prix Ulysse. She has since published two more novels about the experience of migration — La filla ex­trangera and Mare de llet i mel; neither has yet been translated. A fourth novel, The Body Hunter, focuses on a young Catalan woman’s experience of love and sexual desire.

SEIF ELDEINE is an Arab American poet liv­ing outside Worcester, MA, with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Tufts University. He is currently working on a book about the Syrian Civil War and has work published in Star 82 Review and Vayavya, among others.

TSEVETANKA ELENKOVA is the author of four poetry collections and two books of essays, the second of which is an interpretation of four-hundred-year-old Bulgarian church frescos. Her two latest poetry collections have both appeared in English: The Seventh Gesture (Shearsman Books, 2010) and Crookedness (Tebot Bach, 2013). She has edited At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria, a selection of seventeen poets in a bilingual Bulgarian-English edition (Shearsman Books, 2012). Her work has appeared in English in the magazines Absinthe, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Review, Zoland Poetry and others. She has been a guest at numerous literary festivals, including Lodève, Poeteka, Struga and Vilenica. She herself has translated poetry into Bulgarian by Raymond Carver, Rosalía de Castro, Lois Pereiro, Fiona Sampson and others. She is editorial director of the publishing house Small Stations Press.

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is a poet, translator, and editor, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination. Eshleman's work has been awarded with the National Book Award for Translation, the Landon Translation prize from the Academy of American Poets (twice), a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy, among other awards and honors.

TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illumnated Villages and Seam. Her writing appears widely in the United States and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me, and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere.

BRUCE and JU-CHAN FULTON are the translators of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction—most recently The Future of Silence: Fiction by Korean Women and The Human Jungle by Cho Chongnae—as well as the graphic novel Moss by Yoon Taeho (serialized at the Huffington Post). Among the Fultons’ awards and fellowships are two U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships (including the first-ever awarded for a Korean project), the Chametzky Prize for Translation from the Massachusetts Review, and a residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, the first awarded for translators from any Asian language.

TESS GALLAGHER is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Dear Ghosts, Moon Crossing Bridge, and My Black Horse. Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems will appear Fall 2011 from Graywolf. Gallagher spends time in a cottage on Lough Arrow in County Silgo in the west of Ireland and also lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, WA.

MARIA GRECH GANADO, poet, translator, critic, studied English at the Universities of Malta, Cambridge and Heidelberg.  She was the first Maltese female to be appointed a Full-Time Lecturer at the University of Malta (Department of English), has published five collections of Maltese poetry, Izda Mhux Biss,1999; Skond Eva, 2001; Fil-Hofra Bejn Spallejha, 2005, Maria Grech Ganado: Monografija, 2010; Taht il-Kpiepel t’Ghajnejja, 2014 (the first of which won a National Book Prize in 2002) and three of English, Ribcage, 2003; Cracked Canvas, 2005; Memory Rape, 2005 (the second of which won a National Book Prize in 2006).  Her poetry in one language or another has appeared in anthologies, magazines and journals both locally and abroad, where it has been translated into over 10 languages. She has been invited to many literary events in different countries and, in 2005,  co-organised an international conference with LAF (Literature Across Frontiers) in Malta. In 2008, thanks to an exchange scheme with Saint James Cavalier, Malta, she was a Resident Fellow for six weeks at the Virginia Centre for the  Creative Arts. Maria has also translated into English much of the poetry and prose written by contemporary Maltese writers.  In 2000, she received the MQR - Midalja ghall-Qadi tar-Repubblika (Medal for Service to the Republic).

DEBORAH GARFINKLE is a writer, critic, independent scholar and translator liv­ing in San Francisco. Worm-Eaten Time: Poems from a Life under Normalization by Pavel Šrut 1968-1989 is Ms. Garfinkle’s second full-length translation from the Czech. Her first, The Old Man’s Verses: Poems by Ivan Diviš, was nominated for the 2008 Northern California Book Award. This year, in addition to earning the NEA Translation Fellowship for Worm-Eaten Time, she was awarded a Translation Grant from the PEN Center USA for her work on the collection. Selected translations from Worm-Eaten Time have been published in Two Lines and Tri-Quarterly Online.

GABRIELLA GHERMANDI, an Ethiopian-Italian writer and performer, was born in Addis Ababa in 1965 and moved to Italy in 1979. She has published short stories in a wide variety of journals and magazines, founded the Atse Tewodros Project, and is also a playwright. She was chosen to be part of the jury panel for the 2014 Neustadt Prize for Literature. Ghermandi is a founding member of the editorial board of El-Ghibli, an online journal of migration literature. Her 2007 debut novel, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, will be published in English this spring.

CARLOS FONSECA GRIGSBY is a poet and a translator. He published the poetry collection Una oscu­ridad brillando en la claridad que la claridad no logra comprender. He is completing a doctorate in literary translation and Spanish American literature at the University of Oxford.

ALICE GUTHRIE is a British translator, editor, journalist, and event producer specializing in Arabic-English literary and media content. Her work has appeared in a range of interna­tional publications, with an increasing focus on Syria, where she studied Arabic between 2001 and 2003. She is the literary producer for Shubbak, London’s biennial festival of Arab arts and culture, and bilingually edits Arabic-English translations for various liter­ary presses. A former Translator in Residence at London’s Free Word Centre and American Literary Translators Association Fellow, in 2015 she was a recipient—with Syrian writer Rasha Abbas—of the Omi International Translation Lab fellowship.

SEKYO NAM HAINES, born and raised in South Korea, immigrated to the US in 1973 as a registered nurse. Her poems have ap­peared in the anthologies Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken, Unlocking the Poem, and Be­yond Words, and in the poetry journal Off the Coast. Her translations of Korean poetry have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail: InTranslation, Harvard Review, and Seventh Quarry Poetry Magazine. She lives in Cambridge, MA, with her family.

EDUARDO HALFON was born in Guatemala City, moved to the United States at the age of ten, went to school in south Florida, studied industrial engineering at North Carolina State University, and then returned to Guatemala to teach literature for eight years at Universidad Francisco Marroquín. Named one of the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá, he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Roger Caillois Prize, José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel, and Guatemalan National Prize in Literature. He is the author of fourteen books published in Spanish and three novels published in English. Halfon frequently travels to Guatemala and is currently a visiting professor in creative writing at the University of Iowa.

CELIA HAWKESWORTH was senior lecturer in Serbian and Croatian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London, until her retirement. She now works as a freelance writer and translator

INGMAR HEYTZE was born and raised in Utrecht, The Netherlands, where he is a rec­ognized and honored poet, journalist, literary organizer, musician, and performer. In 2008, he was awarded the C. C. S. Cronerprijs for his entire oeuvre. In 2009, the city council of Utrecht unanimously appointed him the first official City Poet, through 2011. After that, the Utrecht Poets Guild collectively took the post, with Heytze as a member.

The Brazilian poet, playwright, and novelist HILDA HILST (1930-2004) was one of the most important and controversial writers in the Portuguese language of the twentieth century. In her thirties, Hilst decided to leave the city of São Paulo in order to keep away from social life and concentrate on literature. She went to Campinas and lived in her house Casa do Sol until her death. Because of her strong personality, beauty, intelligence, and because Hilst consistently questioned and went against norms and traditions, the myth surrounding her image has often overshadowed the importance of her work and the critical analysis of it.

JIM HICKS  is the executive editor of the Massachusetts Review.

REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL’S poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming in Ecotone, Connotation Press, Connecticut Review, and The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and her documentary work has been collected in Plundering Appalachia (Earthwise) and This is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak (University Press of Kentucky). She holds an MFA from Drew University and teaches creative writing for Morehead State University. Currently, she is a poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.

SEIKO ITO was born in Tokyo, graduated from the Waseda University School of Law, and worked as an editor at Kodansha before breaking out as a multi-talented hip-hop artist, actor, television personality, essayist, and novelist. His literary debut, No Life King (1988), was shortlisted for the 2nd Mishima Yukio Prize while Botanical Life (1999) won the 15th Kodansha Essay Award. Published in 2013 to critical acclaim, Sozo rajio (Radio Imagination) was shortlisted for both the 26th Mishima Yukio Prize and the 149th Akutagawa Prize and was awarded the Noma Prize for New Writers.

FADY JOUDAH’S latest poetry collections are Alight and Textu from Copper Canyon Press. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry for 2014-2015.

KRZYSZTOF KAKOLEWSKI (1930–2015) was a journalist, writer, and mentor to many gen­erations of Polish journalists. Known for his genre-defining approach to reportage, he published over thirty books, including several novels. In addition to How Have You Been, Sir? (1975), his best-known works include Jak umieraja¸ nies´miertelni (How the Immortal Die), a book describing, among other inci­dents, the murder of Sharon Tate, and Wan´kowicz krzepi (Wan´kowicz Invigorates), a long-form interview with Melchior Wan´kowicz, perhaps the most important fig­ure of the Polish tradition of reportage. How Have You Been, Sir? is a collection of inter­views conducted with former Nazi officials living in the early 1970s in West Germany and the United States. A highly controversial book upon its publication, mostly because of what some saw as the humanizing of war criminals, How Have You Been, Sir? has been immensely popular with readers and was re­published five times in Poland.

ILYA KAMINSKY is the author of the collection Deaf Republic, from Graywolf Press.

M. KASPER a longtime librarian at Amherst College, is also a translator (Gabriel Pomerand’s Saint Ghetto of the Loans, 2006, and Paul Scheerbart’s Development of Aerial Militarism, 2007, among others), and a book artist whose most recent is Open-Book (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010).

Poet and translator JOEL THOMAS KATZ has worked in Silicon Valley as a business soft­ware specialist. His poems have appeared in Sand Hill Review, Montserrat Review, Disquiet­ing Muses Quarterly, Spillway, and Red Wheel­barrow. He is the author of the chapbook Away and the poetry blog Poem-Pairs. To­gether with Robert Perry, he has translated the work of Dutch poets Ingmar Heytze and Saskia Stehouwer.

CATHERINE MAIGRET KELLOGG was born and raised in France and moved to the US al­most twenty years ago. She keeps a day job in digital marketing, but literary translation is her passion. An excerpt from her co-translation of The Dancing Other, by Suzanne Dracius, has appeared in the New England Review. She lives in New York City with her husband.

Born and educated in Bihar, India, TABISH KHAIR is the author of various books, in­cluding the poetry collections Where Parallel Lines Meet and Man of Glass; the studies Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels and The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness; and the novels Just Another Jihadi Jane, The Bus Stopped, Filming, The Thing About Thugs, and How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Mission­ary Position. His novels have been shortlisted for nine prestigious prizes in five countries, including the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Encore Award, and translated into several languages. Khair now mostly lives in a village near the town of Aarhus, Denmark.

PETER KHAN is a professional translator living in Vermont. He has translated works of fiction and nonfiction by numerous Latin American and Spanish writers. His fiction and poetry translations have appeared in various publications, including Grand Street, Gastronomia, Santa Barbara Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and several anthologies.

UZMA ASLAM KHAN was born in Lahore and grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of three novels, including Trespassing and The Geometry of God. Trespassing was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize Eurasia 2003. The Geometry of God was voted one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2009 and won a bronze medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2010. Her fourth novel, forthcoming from Clockroot Books in fall 2012, is Thinner than Skin. “Ice, Mating,” an excerpt from Thinner than Skin, was featured in Granta’s hugely popular issue on Pakistan. Visit her at http://uzmaaslamkhan.blogspot.com/.

HART LARRABEE was raised in the Finger Lakes region of central New York State and now lives with his family in the little town of Obuse in northern Nagano, Japan. His translations of short stories by Fumio Takano and Mitsuyo Kakuta have appeared, respectively, in the anthologies Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction (2012) and The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction (2015). He is the author/translator of Haiku: Classic Japanese Short Poems (2016), a compilation of haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki. He also translates non-fiction, particularly in the fields of art, design, and architecture.

DANIELLE LEGROS GEORGES was named poet laureate of the city of Boston in 2015, and is the author of two books of poems, The Dear Remote Nearness of You and Maroon. She is a professor in the Creative Arts in Learning Division of Lesley University, and a faculty member of the William Joiner Institute Summer Writer’s Workshop, University of Massachusetts, Boston. She serves as a consulting poetry editor for Solstice and Salamander literary magazines.

JULIA LEVERONE lives and teaches in north Texas, where she is writing her dissertation for the comparative literature Ph.D. program at Washington University in St. Louis. She has her MFA from the University of Maryland. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review, B O D Y, Asymptote, and Poetry International. She is the editor of Sakura Review.

JACQUELINE LOSS is an associate professor of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her publications include Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary (University of Texas Press, 2013), Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place (Palgrave, 2005), and the co-edited volumes Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience (Palgrave, 2012) and New Short Fiction from Cuba (Northwestern University Press, 2007), among numerous articles and translations.

ANNE MCLEAN studied history in London, Ontario, and literary translation in London, England, and now lives in Toronto. She translates Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, travelogues, memoirs, and other writings by authors such as Héctor Abad, Julio Cortázar, and Enrique Vila-Matas. Her translations of Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas and The Armies by Evelio Rosero both won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and her translation of The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez won the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

One of Bosnia’s most prominent poets and writers, SEMEZDIN MEHMEDINOVIĆ is the author of four books, and has worked as an editor, journalist, and filmmaker. The English translation of his spare and haunting Sarajevo Blues, written under the horrific circumstances of the war, was praised by the Washington Post as one of the best literary documents of the conflict. After the war, he and his family came to the United Statesas political refugees, settling in Alexandria, VA. In 2004, the Oakland-based band Charming Hostess released a CD version of Sarajevo Blues, scored for voices, beatbox, and string trio. Mehmedinović’s ,pst recemt volume of poems, Nine Alexandrines, translated by Ammiel Alcalay, and published by City Lights, was written in response to a cross-country train trip across post-9/11 America, and to twenty-first century life in the heart of the empire.

CHRIS MICHALSKI’S poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Puerto del Sol, Circumference, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. His translations of Stanislaw Borokowski’s poetry and prose have recently been featured in Two Lines, 3 Quarks Quarterly, Quarterly Conversation, and other publications.

SLAVKO MIHALIĆ (1928-2007) One of the giants in Croatian literature of the second half of the Twentieth century, Slavko Mihalić was born in 1928 in Karlovac, Croatia, where he finished high school.  He then moved to Zagreb where he worked for a newspaper and published his first book of poetry, Komorna muzika (Chamber Music) in 1954.  During the course of his life, he worked as an anthologist, publisher, editor, critic, writer for children, authored over twenty books of poetry, established several literary journals, and the literary review Most (The Bridge), a Croatian journal of international literary relations which introduced Croatian literature to international readers. In this endeavor he attracted translators and himself translated from several Slavic languages, as well as from the Italian, English, and German.  His main goal has always been to promote literature.  Translated into major world languages, Slavko Mihalić is a recipient of numerous literary awards, among them Tin Ujević, City of Zagreb, Matica Hrvatska, Miroslav Krleža, Goranov Vjenac, Vladimir Nazor and others.

JAY MILTON is a US-based translator who has lived, among other places, in Argentina, France, Italy, and Switzerland. He has never been to Siberia.

FÉLIX MORRISSEAU-LEROY (1912–1998) was a prolific Haitian writer, educator, ac­tivist, and champion of the Haitian Creole language. Morisseau-Leroy is deeply admired and celebrated in the Haitian diaspora, Haiti, and elsewhere for the significant and coura­geous role he played in the promotion and recognition of Haitian Creole as a language of instruction, as well as literature. He was among the first important Haitian writers to write serious literary texts in Haitian Creole, which reflected and celebrated Haitian Creole cultural identity and concerns. Often referred to as the “father of Haitian Creole literature,” his literary influence can be seen in the ex­istence of Creole-language texts written by contemporaries and a younger generation of Haitian writers..

DASHA C. NISULA is a professor at Western Michigan University where she taught Russian language, literature and culture. She is author of four books, and her work has appeared in An Anthology of South Slavic Literatures, Modern Poetry in Translation, Southwestern Review, International Poetry Review, and Colorado Review, among others. A member of the American Literary Translation Association, she lives in Kalamazoo, MI.

ROBERT PERRY is a poet, translator, graphic designer, and book artist, who recently es­tablished Dutch Poet Press, where he designs and publishes poetry art as print and elec­tronic books, letterpress editions, and artist books. In 2015, the press published The Com­fort of Potatoes by poet Janice Dabney, and released a collection of Perry’s poetry, The Art of Painting, in 2018.

GENEVIÈVE PIRON directs the Smith Col­lege Program in Geneva. She is the author of Gulag, A People called Zek (dir.), Léon Chestov, philosophe du dé acinement and L’utopie au quotidien: La vie ordinaire en URSS 1953–1985.

VICTORIA POLETTI was born and raised in England and Italy of Italian parents and has resided in the USA for the past thirty-five years. She studied French & Italian at the University of Birmingham , England, and Education at the University of London’s School of Education.  At the beginning of her career she taught English as a Foreign Language in Italy, France, Spain, and Iran and later ran her own English language school in Kent, England.  For twenty years she taught Italian as Senior Lecturer at Smith College including a senior seminar on the Theory & Practice of Translation. Since her retirement in 2007 she has collaborated with her colleague, Giovanna Bellesia, in translating a variety of works, both online and for publication, by immigrant women to Italy, more recently Cristina Ali Farah’s Madre piccola and Gabriella Ghemandi’s Regina dei fiori e di perle.  It is her firm conviction that these authors not only give us a new understanding of what it means to be writing in Italian in the Twenty-First Century, but who also deliver a message that profoundly resonates with immigrants all over the world.

FREDERIKA RANDALL worked as a cultural journalist for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation and the Italian weekly Internazionale, among others. Her translations include novels by Luigi Meneghello, Ottavio Cappellani, Helena Janeczek, and Sergio Luzzatto’s The Body of Il Duce and Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, for which she and the author shared the Cundill Prize for History. Her awards include a PEN (Heim) Translation Fund award and a Bogliasco Fellowship.

CARLOS MARTÍNEZ RIVAS (1924–1998) is a poet from Nicaragua and considered one of its most important writers of the twentieth century. His work, with the exception of one collection published in Mexico in 1953, La insurrección solitaria, remained unpublished until recently. This poem is from Poesía Re­unida, a collection edited by Pablo Centeno-Gómez and published in 2007 by Anamá Ediciones in Managua.

KRZYSZTOF ROWIŃSKI is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has an MA in American Studies and a BA in English from the University of Warsaw, and he spent a year at the JFK Institute for North America at the Free University of Berlin. He is writing his dis­sertation on representations and discourses of failure in twentieth-century American, Italian, and Polish literature, film, and performance.

KATHARINA ROUT teaches English and Comparative Literature at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Born in Italy, Venezuelan poet and translator, MÁRGARA RUSSOTTO graduated from the Central University of Venezuela, where she was a professor for several years. She has translated poetry and essays by Brazilian and Italian writers, such as Cecília Meireles, Oswald de Andrade, Antonio Candido, Claudio Magris, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Alfonso Gatto, among others, and has published eight books of critical essays. As a poet, her eight collections include Erosiones extremas, Del esplendor, and Obra poética. She received a Fulbright scholarship, the LASA (Latin American Studies Association) Montserrat Ordóñez Award for her collection La ansiedad autorial, and was recently a writer in residence at the Chateau de Lavigny International Writer´s Residence in Switzerland. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, working on poetry and women writers with interdisciplinary and multicultural perspectives.

Born in Andong, Korea, LEE YUK SA (1904 –1944) is one of the first generation of Korean modern poets. He became a poet in his late twenties, coinciding with his political activ­ism as a freedom fighter against Japan’s rule. He was sent to prison seventeen times, even­tually dying in a Japanese jail in Beijing at age thirty-nine, in 1944. Though he left only thirty-six poems, he is considered one of the major modern poets in Korea. His poems at­test to his resilience of spirit against hardship and his deep faith in aesthetics.

AHMED SAADAWI is an Iraqi novelist, poet and screenwriter, born in 1973 in Baghdad, where he works as a documentary filmmaker. He is the author of a volume of poetry, Anniversary of Bad Songs, and three novels, The Beautiful Country, Indeed He Dreams or Plays or Dies, and Frankenstein in Baghdad. In 2010, he was selected for the Beirut 39 project, as one of the thirty-nine best Arab authors under the age of 40.

Born on a farm in the tiny village of Cougou in western France, JAMES SACRÉ has published over sixty books of poetry. His poems have appeared in every major French literary journal, and he has won nearly every prize awarded to poets in France (the Prix Max Jacob in 2013.) He is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres and Doris Silbert Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Smith College, where he taught for many years.

VIPLAV SAINI grew up in India and is an associate professor of economics at Oberlin College. A Kundiman Fellow, he has received a Katharine Bakeless Award from the Bread­loaf Writer’s Conference and a fellowship from the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

GIOVANNI SARTORI was born in 1958 in Trento, in the Alpine northeast of Italy. He has a dozen volumes to his credit, including the novels Tritolo (TNT), Sacrificio (Sacrifice), and Rogo (At the Stake). His most recent novel is Sono Dio (Sagittarius A*). Sartori has won numerous prizes, and three novels have been translated into French. He lives in Paris.

AMANDA C. SEAMAN teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,  where she is a professor of modern Japanese language and literature. A scholar of modern women's literature, genre fiction, and gender studies, she is the author of Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan (2004) and Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan (2016). Her other publications include translations of Japanese women’s literature, writings on Japanese popular culture and Japanese food culture. Her current research explores the representation of
illness and the afflicted in postwar Japanese literature, film, and popular media.

LUTZ SEILER s widely acknowledged as one of the major German poets of his generation. He was born in 1963 in Gera, a town in the eastern part of the state of Thuringia in the former German Democratic Republic. He underwent training as a mason and a carpenter and completed mandatory military service. After studying in Halle and Berlin, in 1997 he became the literary director and occupant of the Peter Huchel Museum outside of Potsdam, the most recent caretaker in a line extending from the poet Huchel himself (who permanently left the GDR in 1971) to the poet and translator Erich Arendt. Seiler has published over six volumes of poetry, short-stories and essays. His many prizes include the Dresden Poetry Prize (2000), the Bremen Prize for Literature (2004), the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2007), and, most recently, the Fontane Prize (2010). He was writer-in-residence at the German Academy in Rome in 2010 and at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles in 2003. In addition, he has been elected a member of the Saxon Academy of the Arts, Dresden, and the Academy of Arts, Berlin. in field latin is his most recent book of poetry.

FRANCESC SERÉS was born in Saidí in 1972 on the border between Catalonia and Spain, near the deserted area of Monegros. Russian Stories, his fictional anthology of Russian writers, won the City of Barcelona Award and the Spanish Critics Award. His works have been translated into Spanish, French, and English. He is a frequent contributor to the Spanish newspaper El País.

ADAM J. SORKIN has published more than sixty books of Romanian translation. His recent books include The Hunchbacks’ Bus by Nora Iuga, longlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry (Bitter Oleander, co-translated with Diana Manole); Syllables of Flesh by Floarea Tutuianu (Plamen, with Irma Giannetti); A Deafening Silence by Magda Cârneci (Shearsman, with Madalina Banucu and Cârneci); and The Return of the Barbarians by Mircea Dinescu (Bloodaxe, with Lidia Vianu). Sorkin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Penn State.

PAVEL SRUT is an award-winning poet, essayist, writer and translator. He belongs to the generation of post-war Czech writers whose voices gained prominence in the flowering of Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring, voices silenced in by censorship in the aftermath of the 1968 Soviet Invasion. Šrut earned the Jaroslav Seifert Award in 2000, for the compilation of his samizdat works, Paperback Poems (Brožované básn ), and his screenplay in verse, Evil Beloved (Zla milá). In 2012, Šrut was given the Karel  apek Prize for his lifetime achievement in literature.  He is also a celebrated writer of children’s literature. He is currently at work on the third and final volume of his beloved series, The Odd Sock Series.

KIM T’AE-YOUNG was born in Seoul in 1974 and studied creative writing at Sungshil Uni­versity. He began publishing fiction in 2005. He appears in English translation for the first time with “Pig on Grass,” the title story of his 2007 short story collection. He is also the author of the novel Nothing to Leave, Nothing to Hide (2010).

CORINE TACHTIRIS translates mainly the work of contemporary women authors from the Czech Republic, Haiti, and Francophone Africa. Her translation of Alexandra Berková’s Dark Love was awarded a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She teaches in the comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

TAKAHASHI TAKAKO (1932–2013) was a Japanese writer and memoirist born in Kyoto. The author of several novels, short story collections, and memoirs, she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1975, following the death of her husband, and ten years later, became a nun in France. She returned to Japan but left the convent after a year, to care for her mother. She continued to publish until her death.

MENEKSE TOPRAK is a writer, translator, and radio journalist based in Istanbul and Berlin. She is the author of the story col­lections Valizdeki Mektup (The Letter in the Suitcase, 2007) and Hangi Dildedir Ask (What Language Does Love Speak, 2009) as well as the novels Temmuz Çocukları (July Children, 2011) and Agitı Sonu (The End of the El­egy, 2014). Regularly contributing literary and cultural essays as well as radio features to journals and stations in both Turkey and Germany, Toprak has also translated contem­porary German literature into Turkish and edited volumes of Turkish literature for Ger­man publication. In 2015, she received the Duygu Asena Novel Award and in 2016 was a writing fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Italy Her work has been translated from Turkish into German, French, and English.

GALSAN TSCHINAG, whose name in his native Tuvan language is Irgit Schynykbaj-oglu Dshurukuwaa, was born in the early 1940s in Mongolia. From 1962 to 1966, he studied at the University of Leipzig, where he adopted German as his written language. Under an oppressive Communist regime, he became a singer, storyteller, poet, and shaman in the ancient Tuvan tradition. As the chief of the Tuvan in Mongolia, Tschinag led his people, scattered under Communist rule, back in a huge caravan to their original home in the High Altai Mountains. Tschinag is the author of more than thirty books, and his work has been translated into many languages. He lives in the Altai, Ulaanbaatar, and Europe

DUBRAVKA UGRESIĆ has established herself as one of Europe’s most distinctive novelists and essayists. From her early postmodernist excursions, to her elegiac reckonings in fiction and the essay with the disintegration of her Yugoslav homeland and the fall of the Berlin Wall, through to her more recent writings on popular and literary culture, Ugresić’s work is marked by a rare combination of irony, polemic, and compassion. In 1991, when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugresić took a firm anti-war stance. Subjected to prolonged public ostracism and persistent media harassment, she left Croatia in 1993. She is the winner of several major literary prizes, and is the winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She lives in Amsterdam.

FRANCISCO URONDO was born in Santa Fe, Argentina, in 1930. A writer best known for his poetry and his interview with the survivors of the Trelew massacre, Urondo also participated actively in the guerilla organization Montoneros, striving against the repressive Argentine state of his time. He and others of his contemporaries pushed literary conventions to give way to a conversational, committed style of writing that witnessed the socio-political turmoil and violence of his country. He was compromised and killed after a car chase with the police in 1976. His assassins were finally sentenced in 2011.

LILIANA URSU is the author of eight books of poetry in Romanian. Her first book in English, The Sky Behind the Forest (Bloodaxe, 1997), translated by Ursu, Adam J. Sorkin, and Tess Gallagher, was shortlisted for Oxford’s Wiedenfeld Prize. Other volumes in English include, most recently, Sean Cotter’s translation, Lightwall (Zephyr 2009). A Path to the Sea, new translations by Ursu, Gallagher, and Sorkin, is due out in 2011 from Pleasure Boat Studio.

ANNA LIDIA VEGA-SEROVA was born in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now St. Petersburg, Russia) in 1968 to a Cuban father and a Rus­sian mother. Soon after her birth, she went to Cuba with her parents, where she lived until age nine before returning to the Soviet Union. In 1989, after having studied visual arts in Belarus, she settled in Cuba. Among her pub­lications are short-story collections Catálogo de mascotas (1999), Bad Painting (1997), and Limpiando ventanas y espejos (2000); the novels Noche de ronda (2001) and Ánima fatua (2007), and the poetry collections Retazos (de las hormi­gas) para los malos tiempos (2004) and Eslabones de un tiempo muerto (2005). In addition, she has had several visual arts exhibitions in Cuba, Russia, and Colombia.

JONATHAN WRIGHT studied Arabic, Turkish and Islamic history at St. John's College, Oxford University. He worked for many years as a journalist in countries across the Arab world including Tunisia, Oman, Lebanon and Egypt. Between 2008 and 2011 he was the managing editor of Arab Media and Society, an online academic journal of the American University in Cairo. In February 2014 he was awarded the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel (2012). He has translated works by several contemporary Arab authors including, Khaled el-Khamissi (Taxi, 2008), Hassan Blasim (The Madman of Freedom Square, 2009 and 2014, and The Iraqi Christ, 2013), Rasha al-Ameer (Judgement Day, 2012), Fahd al-Atiq (Life on Hold, 2012), and essays and articles by Alaa el-Aswany and Galal Amin (2013). Forthcoming in 2014 are Bahaa Abdelmegid’s Temple Bar; Land of No Rain by Amjad Nasser and Sleepwalkers by Sa’ad Makkawi.

KAREN TEI YAMASHITA is the author of seven books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and more recently, Letters to Memory, all published by Coffee House Press. She received a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship, and is professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

YASEMIN YILDIZ teaches German and Comparative Literature at UCLA. She is the author of the award-winning study Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condi­tion (2012) and the recipient of the 2016 DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies. Together with her co-author Michael Rothberg, she is currently completing a book on Turkish-German writers’, artists’, and activists’ innova­tive memory work related to the Holocaust and National Socialism, tentatively titled In­heritance Trouble.

GHASSAN ZAQTAN was born in 1954 near Bethlehem. He obtained a teachers’ training degree from Jordan and worked as a physical education teacher. Zaqtan worked with the Palestinian resistance movement and was editor of Bayader, literary magazine of the PLO. He is the editor of the literary page of Al-Ayyam, the daily newspaper in Ramallah, and the editor of the new poetry quarterly Al-Shou’ara. He has published a number of poetry collections, and his first novel in 1995. He has participated in countless international poetry festivals, and his works have also been translated into French. He lives in Ramallah.