Raúl Zurita was born in Santiago de Chile. In 1973, he was arrested by the Pinochet regime and imprisoned in the hold of a ship. He was a founder of the group Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), which undertook extremely risky public-art actions against the regime. Zurita received the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2000 and the Asan Memorial World Poetry Prize in 2018. His book INRI was translated from Spanish to English and published by NYRB Poets in December 2018.
francine j. harris is the author of play dead, winner of the Lambda Literary and Audre Lorde Awards and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her third collection, Here is the Sweet Hand, is forthcoming on Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, is a Cave Canem poet, and is the 2018/2019 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. The collection was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and named one of the best of 2017 by The Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, Library Journal, and others. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, Bettering American Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Chen earned his MFA from Syracuse University and is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing as an off-site Texas Tech University student. He lives in frequently snowy Rochester, NY with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog, Mr. Rupert Giles. Chen is the 2018-2020 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.
Gracie Leavitt is the author of Livingry and Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star as well as the chapbooks Gap Gardening (These Signals) and Catena (DoubleCross Press). Previous theatrical projects include her original play PITCH, which debuted at La Mama E.T.C. in collaboration with East Coast Artists. Current entanglements include collective management of the discussion group Program of Disappointment. She has lived in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and St. Louis and currently makes a home in Portland, Maine.
Jerika Marchan was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the American South. She holds degrees from Louisiana State University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut collection SWOLE (Futurepoem, 2018) was the June 2018 poetry best seller on Small Press Distribution and was named a Must-Read Race and Culture Book of the Summer by Colorlines magazine. She is an instructor at the New Orleans Writers’ Workshop and a board member of One Book One New Orleans.
Ana Luísa Amaral has published over thirty books of poetry, a play, a novel, essays, and several books for children. She was translated into over twenty languages and published in several countries. She herself has translated the poetry of Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare or John Updike. A collection of her poems has recently come out in the USA, The Art of Being a Tiger, transl. Margaret Jull Costa (Tagus Press, 2018) and another one will also come out in the USA, with New Directions, What’s in a Name, transl. Margaret Jull Costa, (2019). She was awarded national and international prizes and distinctions, among which the Medal for Services to Literature from the cities of Paris and Porto, the Correntes d’Escritas/Casino da Póvoa Prize, the Giuseppe Acerbi Prize for Poetry, the Great Prize of the Portuguese Association of Writers, the Prize PEN for Fiction or the Fondazione Roma International Prize. Apart from writing poetry, her academic research fields are Feminist and Queer Studies.
Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over thirty years and has translated works by novelists such as Eça de Queiroz, José Saramago and Javier Marías, as well as the poetry of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Ana Luísa Amaral and Fernando Pessoa. She has won various prizes, most recently the 2017 Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Rafael Chirbes’ novel On the Edge. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, in 2014 she was awarded an OBE for services to literature, and in 2015 she was given an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Leeds. In 2018 she was made an Officer of the Ordem do Infante Enrique by the Portuguese government and was given a Lifetime Award for Excellence in Translation by the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute in New York.
Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York and Berlin. She contributes to publications including Frieze, Artforum, Flash Art, e-flux, Metropolis, Mousse, and die Zeit. Her first novel, Oval, is forthcoming in June 2019 from Soft Skull Press. www.elviapw.com
Alison C. Rollins holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Born and raised in St. Louis city, she currently works as a Librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of The Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sarget Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has most recently been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award.
Her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophers is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in Spring 2019. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Yanyi is associate editor at Foundry and the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House. He won the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, awarded by Carl Phillips, for The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press, 2019). Find him at yanyiii.com.
Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016). He is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, NYFA, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Stanford University, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Ari lives in Berkeley and teaches in the Bay Area. His most recent chapbook, A Symmetry, was published by The Song Cave in 2018.
Samuel Ace is a trans and genderqueer poet and sound artist, and the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea, (Black Radish Books, 2019). He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writers and Firecracker Alternative Book awards, as well as a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts.