Caio Fernando Abreu (1948-1996) was one of the most important Brazilian writers of the twentieth century. Born near the Argentinean border in Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, Abreu was a prolific journalist who wrote for some of the most widely-distributed magazines and newspapers in the country. Among numerous other prizes, Abreu was a three-time recipient of the country’s top literary prize, the Prêmio Jabuti, in the course of a career that spanned three decades, producing ten books of fiction, two children’s books, and three pieces of theatre. His books have never been out of print in Brazil, and his work has garnered a large online presence due to the popularity of his work with the younger generation, even today, more than twenty years after his death. Abreu’s work—queer, polluted, corrupt—depicts human loneliness in urban Brazil at the end of the twentieth century.
Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her recent work appears in BOMB, The New England Review, The Paris Review Daily, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Southeast Review and Guernica. She is the recipient of fellowships from VIDA, the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, and The American Literary Translators Association. She is the editor of the literary journal Circumference.
Bryce Berkowitz’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Sewanee Review, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, Passages North, The Pinch, Sugar House Review, Hobart, Barrow Street, Permafrost, Salt Hill, Chicago Quarterly Review, and other publications. He is a Visiting Writing Instructor at Montana Technological University.
Aisha Bhoori is a recent graduate of Harvard, where she was a three-time recipient of the Edward Eager Memorial Fund Prize for best creative writing and the Harvard Monthly Prize for demonstrating greatest literary promise. This past summer, she attended the New York State Summer Writers Institute and received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. Currently, she’s based in Los Angeles and working on multiple film and television projects.
Jacob Block was born in Sacramento, California. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at West Virginia University, where he also teaches and is Associate Poetry Editor for Cheat River Review.
K Ming Chang has been published or is forthcoming in The Journal, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She lives in New York.
Geet Chaturvedi is a prominent writer of contemporary Hindi literature. He has authored seven books, including two highly acclaimed collections of novellas, and two collections of poetry. His poems have been translated into seventeen languages, including Spanish, German, Russian, Croatian, Turkish and Nepali. He was awarded the Bharat Bhushan Agrawal Award for poetry and the Krishna Pratap Award for fiction, and named one of the “Ten Best Writers” of India by the English Daily Indian Express. He has translated poems by Pablo Neruda, Lorca, Adonis, Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewski, Bei Dao, Dunya Mikhail, Iman Mersal, and Eduardo Chirinos into Hindi. After spending 16 years in journalism as editor of Dainik Bhaskar, Geet spends his time now writing and working on his eagerly awaited novels Kavipriya and Ranikhet Xpress. He lives in Bhopal, India and his Wiki page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geet_Chaturvedi.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee at age six. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research focuses on poetry about the Holocaust. Julia’s poetry collection, The Many Names for Mother, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Kent State University Press in the fall of 2019. She is also the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014) and her recent poems appear in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, and TriQuarterly, among others. Julia is also editor-in-chief of Construction Magazine (www.constructionlitmag.com) and when not busy chasing her son around the playgrounds of Philadelphia, she writes Other women don’t tell you (http://otherwomendonttellyou.wordpress.com/), a blog about motherhood.
Alice Edwards, Ph.D., is a professor of Spanish at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA. Her main area of research is Latin American women’s life-writing. She is presently at work on the translation of Visiones de infancia, by María Flora Yáñez.
Gregory Emilio’s poetry and essays have appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Permafrost, Pleiades, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Poet’s Billow, and World Literature Today. Recently, he was selected for the 2018 Best New Poets anthology, and won F(r)iction’s 2018 summer poetry contest. He’s the nonfiction editor at New South, and a Ph.D. candidate in English at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
Joshua Garcia lives and writes in Charleston, SC, where he works as a chocolatier.
Anita Gopalan is the recipient of a fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, India. She is also a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant recipient, the second Indian translator to win since its inception. Her translated poetry chapbook, an Anomalous Press winner, is forthcoming soon. She graduated in Computer Science and Mathematics from BITS Pilani, and worked in the banking technology sector for several years in India, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the Middle East. Her work has appeared in Poetry International, Words without Borders, Two Lines Journal, World Literature Today, Asymptote, PEN America, The Offing, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. She serves as a member of the PEN Translation Committee and lives in Bangalore, India.
Alla Gorbunova was born in Leningrad on 30 October, 1985. A poet, prose-writer, translator, and critic, she has published five books of poetry. Her first collection of short prose, Ings & Oughts, was published in 2017 and has been nominated for the Andrei Bely Prize. Her work has been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Latvian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Czech.
Ginger Hanchey was raised in Dayton, Texas. A graduate of Baylor University and Texas A&M University, her poems appear in such publications as Foundry, Tar River Poetry, and San Pedro River Review. Her debut chapbook, Letters of a Long Name, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (July 2019). She lives with her husband and two sons in Waco, Texas and teaches at Baylor.
Andrew Sargus Klein is a queer poet, essayist, and critic living in Baltimore with his partner and their two cats. His work can be found in the Kenyon Review, Pithead Chapel, Cosmonauts Avenue, Hyperallergic, The Offing, Big Lucks, and elsewhere. He is a contributing editor at Platypus Press as well as Territory, and he is a poetry reader at Little Patuxent Review. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore.
Brandon Lewis received his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. His poetry has recently appeared in Talking River and Superstition Review. He is a high school English teacher and lives near Centralia, Washington, with his wife and children.
Josh Luckenbach is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas. He serves as Assistant Poetry Editor and Assistant Web Editor for The Arkansas International.
Ed Moreno is a Mexican-American writer, activist, translator, and long-term HIV survivor. A recipient of Lambda Literary Fellowships and a Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference scholarship, his work has appeared in Words Without Borders, Foglifter, Blithe House Quarterly, and Cleis Press’s “Best Gay” series. His first book, Through the Night: Dispatches from Uranus, expands upon the script of his one-person show, which combines his translations of Brazilian writer Caio Fernando Abreu’s work with Moreno’s own work, in a text examining the role that HIV has played in both authors’ lives. He is currently translating Abreu’s Jabuti Prize-winning 1983 novel Pela noite / Through the Night into English for the first time. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Dujie Tahat is a Filipino-Jordanian immigrant living in Washington state. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Sugar House Review, The Southeast Review, Shenandoah, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Dujie has earned fellowships from the Richard Hugo House and Jack Straw Writing Program. He serves as a poetry editor for Moss and Homology Lit and cohosts The Poet Salon podcast. He got his start as a Seattle Poetry Slam Finalist, a collegiate grand slam champion, and Seattle Youth Speaks Grand Slam Champion, representing Seattle at HBO’s Brave New Voices.
María Flora Yáñez (1898-1982) was a Chilean author novels, short stories, and memoir. Daughter of the liberal founder of the newspaper La Nación and sister to vanguard writer Juan Emar, Yáñez was a prolific writer who explored women’s subjectivity. Her memoir Visiones de infancia, from which this excerpt is taken, is a lyrical, nostalgic exploration of childhood in a sheltered, simpler world that no longer exists.