Writers Listed Alphabetically

Rasha Abbas is a Syrian journalist and writer of short stories. She is currently based in Stuttgart, Germany.

Kareem Abdulrahman is a Kurdish translator and journalist. He obtained his MA in Journalism from the University of Westminster.

Kareem James Abu-Zeid is a freelance translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world, including Adonis, Najwan Darwish, Rabee Jaber, and Dunya Mikhail.

Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian poet and essayist. His many subjects include memory, grief, violence, joy, complex joy, the minutiae of love and of home, the sea as archive and as history, migration, and the intimacy and violence of journeys.

Bisi Adjapon is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Teller of Secrets, whose short story version, "Of Women and Frogs," was nominated for the Caine Prize.

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers.

Rosa Alcalá is a poet and translator originally from Paterson, New Jersey. She teaches in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas-El Paso.​​

Nujoom Alghanem is an Emirati poet, artist, scriptwriter and multi- award- winning film director.

Bachtyar Ali is a prominent Kurdish intellectual from Iraqi Kurdistan. He is one of the leading novelists of his generation and by far the most-read Kurdish novelist.

Kazim Ali is the author of Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, as well as several volumes of poetry, novels, essay collections, and cross-genre texts.

Jeffrey Angles is a poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University.

Zaina Arafat is an LGBTQ Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the novel, You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favorite book of 2020.

Sam Ashworth received his MFA in Fiction from George Mason in 2018 and is a professor of Creative Writing at George Washington University, where he created a class called The Working Writer, which gives students the tools they need to navigate the publishing and freelancing landscape.

Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. She is currently the Poet Laureate of the City of Alexandria, Virginia, where she also volunteers for local organizations that advocate for the civil rights of vulnerable communities.

Andrés Barba first gained renown with his novel La hermana de Katia, nominated for the Premio Herralde and turned into a movie by Mijke de JongBio: Andrés Barba first gained renown with his novel La hermana de Katia, nominated for the Premio Herralde and turned into a movie by Mijke de Jong.

Jazmina Barrera was born in Mexico City in 1988. She was a fellow at the Foundation for Mexican Letters. Her book of essays Cuerpo extraño (Foreign Body) was awarded the Latin American Voices prize from Literal Publishing in 2013.

Dan Beachy-Quick was born in Chicago and raised in Colorado and upstate New York. He was educated at Hamilton College, the University of Denver, and the University of Iowa.

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third poetry collection, titled O, was published by Penguin Books in July 2022.

Chris Beckett was born in London but grew up mostly in Ethiopia, where his father worked at the British Embassy in Addis Ababa.

Rei Berroa was born in the Dominican Republic in 1949. He has published more than 40 books of poetry, literary criticism, and poetry anthologies.

Neil Blackadder is a translator of drama and prose from German and French, specializing in contemporary theatre, and recently retired from a 25-year career teaching theater at Knox College and Duke University.

Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of The First Rule of Swimming (Little, Brown, and Company, 2013), Stillness: and Other Stories (FSG, 2003) and The Stone Fields (FSG, 2004).

Ami Sands Brodoff is the award-winning author of three novels and two volumes of stories.

Roberto Brodsky was recently the cultural attaché at the Embassy of Chile. He has been a professional journalist for 30 years, and is the author of the novels Casa chilena, Veneno, Bosque quemado, and three other novels.

Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her work includes Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon, Bloodline by Patigül, Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong, and Mystery Train by Can Xue.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, a writer, and an artist. An alumna of the Barbican Young Poets and recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, she has held residencies in the United States and Brazil, and in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Juan Gómez Bárcena's was the Cheuse Center's Annual Writer-in-Residence from Spain, in collaboration with Spain Culture and Arts in 2023.

Matías Candeira (Madrid, 1984) teaches creative writing and is a screenwriter and storyteller who has published a novel: Fiebre [Fever] (2015) and five collections of short stories.

Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, essayist. Carlson’s translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull, 2021) won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and she has twice received literature translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jesus Carrasco was born in Badajoz, Spain, and now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. Out in the Open (Intemperie), his debut novel, was a huge bestseller in Spain, published in more than twenty-one countries, and is the winner of many international awards

Felicity Castagna won the 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction for her previous novel, The Incredible Here and Now, which was shortlisted for the Children's Book Council of Australia and NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and adapted for the stage by the National Theatre of Parramatta.

Israel Centeno is a writer of short stories and novels, a professor of literary creativity, a translator, and a cultural promoter.

Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist as a poet and a civil rights attorney. She is the daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India, and lives in Washington, DC with her family.

Linda Chavez has had a long and varied career in American politics that stretches across the political spectrum, both in and out of government. She served as the highest-ranking woman in the Reagan White House, became the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Maryland, and founded a series of public policy organizations focusing on race, ethnicity, and immigration.

Álex Chico is a poet, storyteller, and literary critic.

Panashe Chigumadzi is an essayist and novelist. Her 2015 debut novel, Sweet Medicine, won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award.

Walter Byongsok Chon is an Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy and Theatre Studies at Ithaca College.

Christopher Clarke (PhD, 2020, French, The Graduate Center, CUNY) teaches in the Translation Studies program.

Susan Coll works in the events department at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. She is the author of five novels. Her third novel, “Acceptance,” was made into a television movie starring Joan Cusack.

ennifer Croft is the recipient of Cullman, Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, and NEA grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation, the 2018 Found in Translation Award, and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize (for her astonishing translation of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk).

Najwan Darwish (b. 1978) is one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets. Since the publication of his first collection in 2000, his poetry has been hailed across the Arab world and beyond as a singular expression of the Palestinian struggle.

Nicholas Delbanco is the author of numerous books of fiction and non-fiction, including "It Is Enough", as well as "Why Writing Matters".

Timothy Denevi is the author of Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism (PublicAffairs, 2018) and Hyper: A Personal History of ADHD (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, where he taught Russian literature for a number of years.

Yasmine El Rashidi is the author of The Battle for Egypt: Dispatches from the Revolution and Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt. She is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a contributing editor of the Middle East culture journal Bidoun.

Zein El-Amine is a Lebanese-born poet and writer. He has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland.

Karen Emmerich is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and a translator of (modern) Greek poetry and prose.

Shelley Fairweather-Vega is a professional translator specializing in new prose and poetry from Central Asia. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

Laura Fernández is the author of six novels. Her work has also been translated into French and Italian and her stories have been included in numerous anthologies.

Elisa Ferrer graduated in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Valencia and moved to Madrid to study scriptwriting at the Madrid Film School (ECAM).

Tope Folarin is the author of A Particular King of Black Man, published in August 2019 by Simon & Schuster.

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist.

Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter; Independence Day, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Lay of the Land; and the New York Times bestseller Canada.

Shelley Frisch holds a doctorate in German literature from Princeton University.

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is the author of The Sleeping World (Touchstone, 2016). She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, the Millay Colony, Willapa Bay AiR, and the Blue Mountain Center.

Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia.

Forrest Gander is a writer and translator with degrees in geology and English literature.

Nirmal Ghosh is the US Bureau Chief in Washington DC for The Straits Times, Singapore’s and South East Asia's #1 English daily.

Maria Jose Gimenez is a Venezuelan-Canadian poet and translator. Recipient of a 2016 Gabo Prize for Translation and fellowships from the NEA, The Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Endowment.

Emily Goedde earned a master’s in fine arts degree in literary translation from the University of Iowa and a doctoral degree in comparative literature from the University of Michigan.

Mariam Gomaa is a physician and writer based in Washington, DC. She is the author of Between the Shadow & the Soul (Backbone Press).

Ashlee Green (she/they), second-year nonfiction MFA candidate at Mason, and a 2023 Cheuse Fellow.

Heather Green is the author of No Other Rome (Akron Poetry Series, 2021) and the translator of Tristan Tzara's Speaking Alone (forthcoming 2024) and Noontimes Won (Octopus Books, 2018)).

Jennifer Grotz is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Still Falling. Also a translator from French and Polish, her co-translations with Piotr Sommer of Jerzy Ficowski's Everything I Don't Know received the PEN Award for Best Book of Poetry in Translation in 2022.

Sophia Hall can be found wearing a frog bucket hat and Van Gogh socks. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Writing Awards, the Library of Congress, and several other organizations.

Nathalie Handal was born in Haiti and raised in Latin America, France, and the Arab world. She received an MFA from Bennington College and an MPhil in drama and English from the University of London.

Nawaf Ashur Haskan is a Yazidi poet, originally from Iraq.  While living in the Washington, DC area, he was a research fellow with the National Endowment for Democracy.

Christian Hawkey, a poet and translator of German poetry, was born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1969. He has two full-length collections and two chapbooks of poems.

Robin Hemley, born in New York City, is an American nonfiction and fiction writer.

Danuta Hinc is a Polish American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

Michael Holtmann is the Center for the Art of Translation's executive director and publisher.

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, essayist and curator based in Bombay.

Tania James is the author of the novel The Tusk That Did the Damage (Knopf, 2015), Aerogrammes and Other Stories (Knopf, 2012), the novel Atlas of Unknowns (Knopf 2009), and the novel Loot (Knopf, 2023)

Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from Arabic and Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Her translation of Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (Fitzcarraldo/New Directions) was a finalist for the National Book Awards and longlisted for the Booker International Prize.

Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a translator and writer. She is one of the founding editors of EuropeNow, a journal of research and art at Columbia University, and a returning judge for the Best Translated Book Award.

Dennis Johnson is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer and journalist who founded the first American book blog, MobyLives.

Ilya Kaminsky is a poet, critic, translator, and professor named by the BBC as one of 12 artists that changed the world in 2019. He was born in Odessa in the former Soviet Union.

Kateryna Kazimirova is an editor and media manager. She holds Master’s degrees in Philology (Ukrainian Language and Literature) and History of Art and a Postgraduate degree in Literary Theory from Vasyl’ Stus Donetsk National University.

Sally Keith is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently River House (Milkweed 2015).

Roy Kesey is the translator of Pola Oloixarac's debut novel, Savage Theories (Soho Press 2017.)

Lyudmyla Khersonska was born in Tiraspol, Moldova, in 1964. She is the author of two books of poetry, Vse svoi, named one of the ten best poetry books of 2011, and Tyl’naia-litsevaia (2015).

Boris Khersonsky was born in Chernivtsi in 1950. He studied medicine in Ivano-Frankivsk and Odessa. He initially worked as a neurologist, before becoming a psychologist and psychiatrist at the Odessa regional psychiatric hospital.

Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include The Dark Path to the River and No Marble Angels, along with stories and essays in collections and anthologies, including Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement and Remembering Arthur Miller.

Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of The Lords of Easy Money, The Meat Racket and Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

Judy Leserman is a candidate in Poetry Writing and holds a BA from Yeshiva University and an MA from CUNY Lehman College.

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a poet, translator, and assistant professor at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). She earned her PhD in Kurdish studies at the University of Exeter, specializing in 19th-century poetry, and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as an MEd from the University of Virginia.

María Teresa León was born in Madrid (Spain). There they acquired the interest in art and literature by spending the Sundays of his childhood in tireless visits to the Prado Museum and the National Library.

Johannes Lichtman’s debut novel, Such Good Work, was chosen as a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation. His second novel, Calling Ukraine, will be published in April 2023.

Jacki Lyden regards herself first and foremost as a writer and looks for the distinctive human voice everywhere: in decades of making radio pieces, live public interviews, podcasts and print.

Rebekah Maggor is a translator, theatre director, and academic. She is Assistant Professor of Performance at Cornell University. Her research centers on political theatre and drama in translation, with an emphasis on recent Arabic drama from Egypt, Palestine, and Syria.

Vasyl Makhno was born in Chortkiv, Ternopil oblast, in 1964. He is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry.

Yamen Manai was born in 1980 in Tunis and currently lives in Paris. Both a writer and an engineer, Manai explores in his prose the intersections of past and present, and tradition and technology.

Khet Mar is a Burmese journalist, novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist who has actively written about the true lives of ordinary people and the current situation in Burma.

Soledad Marambio was born in Santiago, Chile. She is a poet, translator and an editor at Brutas Editoras and is currently a PhD. Candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The Point, The Paris Review Daily, the TLS, The Yale Review and elsewhere.

David G. Marwell, Ph.D. has had a distinguished career in public history. He spent nine years at the US Department of Justice, where, as Chief of Investigative Research, he conducted research in support of the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the United States.

Khaled Mattawa is the author of five books of poetry, Fugitive Atlas (Graywolf, 2020), Tocqueville (New Issues Press, 2010) Amorisco (Ausable Press, 2008), Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable Press, 2003) and Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1996), and a chapbook, Mare Nostrum (Sarabande Books, 2019). His fifth book of poems, Fugitive Atlas, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in October 2020.

Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today.

Elena Medel is a Spanish writer and the founder and publisher of La Bella Varsovia, now a poetry imprint of Anagrama.

Leeya Mehta is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist. Her short stories have appeared in a number of international publications, including in the UK, US, Austria & India.

Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction.

Dunya Mikhail is the author of several books of poetry, including In Her Feminine Sign (New Directions, 2019), which was chosen by The New York Public Library as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019.

Henry Mills was born in DC to a Salvadoran mother and a Jewish-American father. His work has appeared in Acentos, Epiphany, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States.

Carol Mitchell is a graduate of GMU’s MFA in fiction. Her work focuses on the Caribbean region. She has written eighteen books for children, three published by HarperCollins UK and the others by CaribbeanReads Publishing.

Anna Deeny Morales is a translator, literary critic, and dramatist. Her translations of Raúl Zurita’s works include Purgatory, Dreams for Kurosawa, and Sky Below, Selected Works, of which she is also the editor.

Azar Nafisi is the author of the multi-award-winning New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, as well as Things I’ve Been Silent About, and The Republic of Imagination.

Ahmed Naji, a writer from Egypt, is presently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. His work touches on a variety of themes, including sci-fi, Islamic methodology, sex, friendship, prison literature, music, magic, and masculinity.

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and in various combinations.

Vivek Narayanan was born in India to Tamil parents and grew up in Zambia.  He earned a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from Stanford University and a master’s in creative writing from Boston University.

Ezio Neyra is a Peruvian writer, scholar, editor, and translator. His writing has appeared in Cuba, Chile, Mexico, the United States, and Peru. He is the author of  Habrá que hacer algo mientras tanto (2005),  Todas mis muertes (2006), Tsunami (2012), and Pasajero en La Habana (2017).

Helon Habila Ngalabak is a professor of creative writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He was born in Nigeria and worked as a journalist before moving to the U.S.

Margaret Noodin received an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Kris O'Shee spent four decades as a modern dancer and choreographer, including a decade in London, where she cofounded Junction Dance Company and taught at the London Contemporary Dance School.

Achy Obejas is a Cuban-American writer, translator, and activist whose work focusing on personal and national identity has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine and many other publications.

Faye Olayo is a writer, performer, and story-teller. She is a member of the writers collective Ubbog Cordillera Young Writers and the Baguio Writers Group.

Ladan Osman is a Somali-born poet and essayist who now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019), a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text; The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize; and the chapbook Ordinary Heaven, which appeared in the boxed set Seven New Generation African Poets (2014).

Lisa Page is co-editor of We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, LitHub Weekly, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, The Crisis, Playboy, the Washington Post Book World, and more.

Steven Pearlstein is the Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University. He was previously a business and economics columnist at The Post, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2008.

Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. She is the translator of Prabda Yoon’s The Sad Part Was (2017) and Moving Parts (September 2018).

Marcia Lynx Qualey is an editor, writer, occasional translator, and speaker who focuses on Arabic literature and translation. She has a special love of Arabic literature for young readers.

Michael Reynolds is editor in chief at Europa Editions. He is the author of a collection of short stories entitled Sunday Special, and a book for young readers entitled La notte di Q and illustrated by Brad Holland.

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera was born in Puerto Rico and grew up there and in the United States. He received a BA from the Universidad de Puerto Rico and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Jennifer Robertson is a poet, critic, and consultant based in Bombay. Her poems have been published in the US, UK, and India.

Mikkel Rosengaard is a two-time recipient of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Literary Fellowship.

Arpita Roy is an MFA graduate in Creative Writing, Poetry from George Mason University. She completed her BA and MA in English from Jadavpur University. She is a 2023 Cheuse Fellow, who visited Ireland, investigating the relationship between solitude and community.

Toni Sala is the author of over a dozen novels and works of nonfiction, and in 2005 he was awarded the National Literature Prize by the Catalan government. He lives in Barcelona.

Alejandro Saravia was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia and lives in Montreal, where he works as a journalist.

Olivia E. Sears is the board president and founder of the Center for the Art of Translation. She co-founded the journal Two Lines in 1993 and was its editor for twelve years.

Bewketu Seyoum is an Ethiopian writer, poet, essayist, and humorist. He was born in Mankusa and has a degree in psychology from Addis Ababa University. He has written six books of stories, poetry novels, and collections of essays in English and his native language Amarhic.

Inma Lopez Silva is a Galician writer, theatre critic and columnist for several newspapers. She holds a PhD in Philology from the University of Santiago de Compostela and is a graduate of Theatre Studies at the Sorbonne.

Jace Raymond Smellie is an MFA graduate from George Mason University originally from Pocatello, Idaho. Jace is a descendent of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.

Esperanza Hope Snyder is assistant director of Bread Loaf in Sicily and co-coordinator of the Lorca Prize, and a poet, a novelist, and a playwright.

Anna Starobinets is a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. The Awkward Age, her collection of short stories, was a finalist of the National Bestseller Prize in 2006 and has been translated into seven languages.

Amy Stolls is the Director of Literary Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts. She oversees a portfolio that includes grants to organizations for projects such as the publication of books and literary journals, book festivals, writing workshops, and reading series; fellowships to individual poets, prose writers, and translators.

Donna Stonecipher is a poet, translator, editor, and teacher.

Peter Streckfus is the author of two poetry books: Errings, winner of Fordham University Press’s 2013 POL Editor’s Prize, and The Cuckoo, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2003.

Manil Suri was born in Mumbai in 1959 and is a distinguished university professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math, as well as three internationally acclaimed novels.

Caridad Svich first independent feature film (as co-screenwriter) Fugitive Dreams, based on her play, receives its world premiere at the 2020 Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal and its US premiere at the 2020 Austin Film Festival.

Born in Oakland, California, to Chinese immigrants, Amy Tan rejected her mother’s expectations that she become a doctor and concert pianist. She chose to write fiction instead.

Deborah Tannen is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Linguistics. In addition to her seventeen academic books and over one hundred scholarly articles, she has written eight books for general audiences.

Kim Thúy was born in 1968 in Saigon, Vietnam, but fled with her family a decade later, eventually settling in Quebec. She earned degrees from the Université de Montréal in linguistics and translation (1990) and law (1993) and has worked as a translator, interpreter, lawyer, food commentator and restaurateur.

Jeremy Tiang (he/ they) is a novelist, playwright and literary translator. He has translated over twenty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Yan Ge, Lo Yi-Chin, Liu Xinwu and Zhang Yueran.

Rolando B. Tolentino is faculty of University of the Philippines Film Institute and former dean of the UP College of Mass Communication. He is Director of the UP Institute of Creative Writing where he also serves as fellow.

Poet, translator, and scholar Mónica de la Torre was born and raised in Mexico City. She earned a BA from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and, with the support of a Fulbright scholarship, relocated to New York in 1993 to pursue an MFA and a PhD in Spanish literature at Columbia University.

Tenzin Tsundue is an Indian-born Tibetan writer and activist. He is the award-winning author of four books and is currently working on a fifth. Tsundue combines activism and academia, touring colleges all over India and giving lectures on exile writing, resistance, culture and identity.

Lara Vergnaud is a translator of prose, creative nonfiction, and scholarly works from the French. She is the recipient of two PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants, a French Voices Grand Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

Martin Vopěnka was born in 1963 in Prague, where he studied nuclear and physical engineering and worked in the Psychiatry Research Institute before devoting himself to literature after the Velvet Revolution.

Sergio Waisman is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures, and Affiliated Faculty of Judaic Studies at The George Washington University. He has translated, among others, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution by Mariano Azuela (Penguin Classics), three books by the Argentine Ricardo Piglia, and three titles for Oxford’s Library of Latin America series.

Tara June Winch is an Indigenous Australian (Wiradjuri) writer based in France. Her first novel Swallow the Air, (UQP) 2006 was critically acclaimed.

Xu Xi is the author of fifteen books, including five novels, eight collections of short fiction & essays, one memoir and one textbook.

Poet and translator Katherine E. Young has translated prose from Russia and Azerbaijan and poetry from Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.

Jung Yun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. She studied at Vassar College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing.

Alex Zucker's first visit to Czechoslovakia was in 1987. He was inspired to translate by Peter Kussi, his Czech instructor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where in 1990 he received a master's degree.

Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, inspired by both her grandmothers and her coal-mining grandfathers. She is the recipient of the American Academy of Art's Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and multiple Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts.