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About the Contributors
Maram Al-Masri was born in Latakia, Syria, studied at Damascus University, and moved to France in 1982. Her literary awards include the Prix d’Automne de Poésie de la Société des Gens De Lettres, the Adonis Prize of the Lebanese Cultural Forum, the Premio Citta di Calopezzati for the section Poésie de la Mediterranée, Il Fiore d’Argento for cultural excellence, and the Dante Alighieri Prize.
Xhevdet Bajraj is an ethnic Albanian Kosovar poet, dramatist, and translator living in Mexico. Deported from Kosovo in 1999, he was granted asylum at the Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl in Mexico City through the efforts of the International Parliament of Writers. He has written in both Albanian and Spanish and published over fifteen volumes of poetry. He has twice won the Kosovo Writers’ Society’s award for best book of poetry, and received the Goliardos International Prize for Poetry and the Katarina Josipi award for best original drama written in Albanian.
Tomica Bajsić was born in 1968 in Zagreb, Croatia. A poet, prose writer, graphic artist, and translator, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He has published five poetry books, two prose books, and a picture book. His poetry collection with drawings, Nevidljivo more / Invisible Sea, was published in 2018. His honors include the Ivan Goran Kovačić and Dobriša Cesarić Awards and the National Award for Poetry. He is an editor of the Croatian literary magazine Poezija, founder of Druga Priča Design & Publishing, and the president of the Croatian PEN Centre.
Bei Dao was born in Beijing and is one of the major poets of the Misty School in China. In exile from 1989 to 2006, he moved to Hong Kong in 2007. His books in translation include The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems (2010), Unlock (2000), and At the Sky’s Edge: Poems 1991–1996 (1996). He was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Alok Bhalla is a scholar, translator, and poet based in Delhi, India. Among his books are Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home, The Place of Translation in a Literary Habitat, and the four-volume edited collection Stories about the Partition of India. His books of translation into English include Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug, Intizar Husain’s A Chronicle of the Peacocks, Ram Kumar’s The Sea and Other Stories, and Nirmal Verma’s Dark Dispatches. He was a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem; fellow at the Rockefeller Centre, Bellagio, Italy; and fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.
David Brunson is an MFA candidate in poetry and a translator studying at the University of Arkansas. He serves as outreach director, assistant translation editor, and assistant poetry editor at The Arkansas International.
Hélène Cardona is a poet and translator. Her books of poetry include Dreaming My Animal Selves and Life in Suspension, and she has translated Birnam Wood by José Manuel Cardona, Beyond Elsewhere by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, and Ce que nous portons by Dorianne Laux. She studied at the Sorbonne, worked as an interpreter for the Canadian Embassy in Paris, and received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut and the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía.
Chen Dongdong was born in Shanghai in 1961. He graduated from Shanghai Normal University, began writing poetry in 1981, and became associated with a group of experimental poets in the 1980s. His recent publications include Unbanned Title (2011) and The Guide Map (2013). He now lives in Shenzhen.
Chen Zeping is a professor of Chinese linguistics at Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou province. He has taught at Southern Oregon University and Ehime University in Matsuyama, Japan, as well as in Malaysia and Indonesia. In collaboration with Karen Gernant, he has translated more than ten books, including the novels of Can Xue, Alai, and Zhang Yihe, and the short stories of Kangkang Zhang.
Rain Chudori is an Indonesian writer, curator, screenwriter, actress, and founder of Comma Books, a publishing division of Penerbit KPG, in Jakarta. Her books include Monsoon Tiger and Other Stories (2015), Imaginary City (2017), and Biru dan Kisah-Kisah Lainnya (2018). She has also written for the Jakarta Post, Jakarta Globe, Tempo, Salihara, and other publications.
Francis Combes has published fifteen volumes of poetry, including La Fabrique du bonheur, Cause commune, Le Carnet bleu de chine, and La Clef du monde est dans l’entrée à gauche. He has translated several poets into French, including Mayakovsky, Heine, Brecht, and Attila Joszef. He has published two novels and is a founder of the publishing house Le Temps des Cerises.
Mangalesh Dabral is a poet, translator, and essayist. His books of poems include Aawaaz Bhi Ek Jagah Hai (Voice Too Is a Place), Mujhe Dikha Ek Manushya (I Saw a Human Being), and Naye Yug Mein Shatru (Enemy in the New Era). He has translated the works of Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, Yannis Ritsos, and others. His honors include the Sahitya Akademi Award.
Keki Daruwalla has published nine volumes of poetry and received the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia. His Collected Poems 1970–2005 was published in 2006. He is also the author of three volumes of short stories, a novella, two collections of poetry for children, and a travelogue.
Patrick Deeley is from Loughrea, County Galway, Ireland. The most recent of his seven books of poetry, The End of the World, was shortlisted for the 2020 Farmgate National Poetry Award. His other honors include the 2001 Eilís Dillon Book of the Year Award, the 2014 Dermot Healy International Poetry Prize, and the 2019 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry.
Dong Danzi (1964–2013) was born in Dongdang Village, Qi River City, Hunan province. He dropped out of high school in 1982 and lived on temporary teaching and editing jobs in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Changsha, Yiyang, and other places. He published three poetry books and was awarded the Best Poetry Award by the Journal of Selected Poetry in 2006. He died of a heart attack at age forty-nine. The following year, his sister established the prestigious Dong Dangzi Poetry Prize.
Duo Duo was born in Beijing. He was in exile for fifteen years and returned to China in 2004. His books in English translation include The Boy Who Catches Wasps (2002) and Snow Plain (2010). He is the first Chinese recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In his poem “River of Amsterdam,” the word boys refers to the 1989 students.
Efe Duyan was born in Istanbul, Turkey. His books of poetry include Sikça Sorulan Sorular (Frequently Asked Questions), Tek Şiirlik Aşklar (One Poem Stands), and Takas (Swap). He teaches the history of architecture at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul.
Thomas Farber received three NEA fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He was a Fulbright scholar and a Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio. His recent books include Here and Gone, The End of My Wits, Brief Nudity, and The Beholder. A former visiting writer at the University of Hawai‘i, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is publisher/editor-in-chief of El León Literary Arts.
Catherine Filloux is a playwright whose work focuses on human rights and social justice. Her many plays and librettos have been produced in New York and across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. She is a cofounder of Theatre Without Borders and a recipient of the Otto René Castillo Award for Political Theatre, the Planet Activist Award, and awards from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the O’Neill, the MAP Fund, and the Asian Cultural Council.
Sylva Fischerová teaches at Charles University in Prague. She has published ten poetry collections in Czech. Selections of her poems in English translation, published by Bloodaxe Books, include The Tremor of Racehorses (1990) and The Swing in the Middle of Chaos (2010). With Stuart Friebert and A. J. Hauner, she translated her book Stomach of the Soul (2014) into English.
Keith Foulcher is an honorary associate in the Department of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney. His many books include translations of Putu Oka Sukanta’s The Song of the Starling: Poetry of Oppression and Lies, Loss, and Longing. He has also translated Sitor Situmorang’s Oceans of Longing: Nine Stories (with Harry Aveling and Brian Russell Roberts).
Stuart Friebert cofounded Field Magazine and the Field Trans lation Series of Ober lin College Press. His thirteen books of poems include Funeral Pie (1997) and Floating Heart (2015), and ten volumes of translations. He coedited The Longman Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem, and A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry & Poetics.
Sarabjeet Garcha is a poet and a translator of English and Hindi who lives in Delhi. He is the author of four poetry collections, including A Clock in the Far Past (2018), Lullaby of the Ever-Returning (2012), and The Half-Moon Halo (2004). He received a fellowship in Hindi literature from the Ministry of Culture of India.
Karen Gernant is a professor emerita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University and a translator of contemporary Chinese fiction. In collaboration with Chen Zeping, she has translated more than ten books, including the novels of Can Xue, Alai, and Zhang Yihe, and the short stories of Kangkang Zhang.
Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born poet, translator, and writer. In the U.S. she earned an MA in English at Simmons College and an MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her book Bread on Running Waters (2013) was a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and the May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize. Her honors include the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize.
Richard Gwyn is a Welsh writer and translator. His novels include The Color of a Dog Running Away (2007) and The Blue Tent (2019). He is the compiler/translator of the anthology The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America (2016).
Anne Henochowicz is an executive editor at the China Channel. From 2011 to 2016, she was the translations editor at China Digital Times. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Cairo Review of Books, the Postcolonialist, and Foreign Policy. She studied Inner Mongolian folk music at the University of Cambridge and Ohio State University, and is an alumna of the Penn Kemble Democracy Forum Fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy.
Joe Hill was born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in 1879 in Gävle, Sweden, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1902. An itinerant worker, frequently unemployed, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1910 and began writing union songs, satirical poems, and organizing workers using the name Joe Hill. In 1914, while working as a laborer at the Silver King Mine, in Park City, Utah, he was arrested, charged with murder, convicted, and executed by firing squad the following year. His trial attracted international attention; many believed he was innocent but had been convicted because of his work as a union organizer. He has been regarded as a martyr to the cause of organized labor. His ashes were placed in 600 envelopes and sent to supporters around the world to be scattered to the winds.
Jack Hirschman is a San Francisco poet, translator, editor, and political activist. He is the author of over a hundred books of poetry and eighty books of translation from twelve languages. Among his volumes of poetry are Front Lines, All that’s Left, and Passion, Provocation and Prophecy. In 2006, he was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco, where he was instrumental in founding the Revolutionary Poets Brigade and the Union of Left Writers of San Francisco.
H. L. Hix has published ten collections of poetry, including Then Birds: Obsessionals 1985–2010 and As Much As, If Not More. He has cotranslated the work of such Estonian poets as Eugenijus Alisanka, Jüri Talvet, and Juhan Liiv, and has received the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Grolier Prize, the Peregrine Smith Award, and fellowships from the NEA. He teaches at the University of Wyoming.
Huang Fan is a poet and fiction writer living in Nanjing. His poetry collections in Chinese include Elegies of Nanjing and Selected Poems of a Decade. His awards include the Writer’s Golden Prize for Short Story, Beijing Literary Prize for Poetry, Biennial China Houtian Culture and Art Prize, Fangcao Biennial Top Ten Prize for Poetry, and Jinling Literary Prize for Poetry.
Hung Hung was born in Taiwan. He is a writer, poet, editor, stage director, film-maker, and, since 2004, the curator of Taipei Poetry Festival. His six collections of poetry include Homemade Bomb. He has been awarded the First Poetry Prize in the China Times Literary Award, the United Daily News Literary Award, the Poet of the Year Prize, and the Nanjing Literature Prize.
Jiang Libo was born in Yinzhou, Zhejiang, in 1967. He published his first book of poems while in college. Since then, he has published the collections Folded Moon (1992), Consonant Keys (2015), Empire Tea House (2017), and Misty Index (forthcoming). He received the Rougang Poetry Award in 2015.
Jiang Xue is the pen name for Jiang Shan, born in 1970 in Hunchun, Hubei province. He grew up in an iron-mining area in Huangshi and started publishing literary works in 1987. He is a poet, writer, artist, and founder and editor of Houtian Journal (houtian means “the day after tomorrow” in Chinese).
Rio Johan has published two books in Indonesian: a short-story collection, Ak sara Amananuna (The Alphabet of Amananuna), and a novel, Ibu Susu (Mother’s Milk). He lives in Paris.
Barbara Jurša graduated in English language and comparative literature from the University of Ljubljana, where she is a graduate student in literary studies. She has published her own poetry in Slovenian literary magazines.
Kerry Shawn Keys has published nearly fifty books, including poetry, plays, fiction, and children’s literature. He is the recipient of an NEA fellowship and awards from the Poetry Society of America and Lithuanian Writers’ Union. He is a member of International PEN and is the Republic of Užupis’ World Poetry Ambassador.
Lin Zi is a poet and artist from Henan province. Born in the 1960s, she started writing poetry in her forties and gained immediate recognition. She has also won nationwide recognition for her art. Her collection of poems and drawings won The Most Beautiful Book award in 2016.
Lü De’an is a poet and painter born in Fuzhou, Fujian province. His books of poetry include Paper Snake, The Other Half of Life, The South to the North, Right Where One Belongs, and Obstinate Stones. In 2011, he won the Yunnan Gaoligong Poetry Prize and established Fujian’s Friday Painting Society.
Luo Yihe (1961–1989) was an important poet and editor of the 1980s. He discovered and published Hai Zi, whose poetry became celebrated nationwide. He joined the hunger strike during the student movement in May 1989 and died that month. In his poem “Splendid, Suppressed,” the word hometown refers to Beijing.
Meng Lang (1961–2018) was born in Shanghai as Meng Junliang. He was an important member of an avant-garde poetry group in the 1980s and early 1990s and was a cofounder of several independent journals in Shanghai. He moved to Hong Kong and died of lung cancer in 2018.
Ming Di is a Chinese poet, translator, and editor based in the U.S. She has published six books of poetry in Chinese, plus a collaborative translation, River Merchant’s Wife. With Neil Aitken, she cotranslated Zang Di’s The Book of Cranes, and with Jennifer Stern, Liu Xia’s Empty Chairs: Selected Poems, a finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. She edited and cotranslated New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry and New Poetry from China 1917–2017. A recipient of Henry Luce Foundation fellowships, she is a cofounder of Poetry East West journal and the China editor for Poetry International Rotterdam.
Brane Mozetič is a Slovene poet, writer, editor, and translator born in Ljubljana in 1958. He studied comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Ljubljana and graduated in 1983. He works as the editor of the literary collections Aleph and Lambda at the Centre for Slovenian Literature. In 2003, he won the Jenko Award for his poetry collection Banalije (Banalities).
Kunwar Narain (1927–2017) was born in Faizabad district, Uttar Pradesh, and became one of the foremost writers in Hindi. His numerous honors include the Sahitya Akademi Award, Padma Bhushan, and Jnanpith, the highest civilian award for overall contributions to Hindi literature. His major works include Koi Doosra Naheen, Atmajayee, Akaron Ke Aas-Pas, Apne Samne, and Aj aur aaj se pehle.
Ann Pancake grew up in Romney and Summersville, West Virginia. Her first collection of short stories, Given Ground, won the 2000 Bakeless Award. Her other books include the novel Strange as This Weather Has Been and Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories. Her honors include a Whiting Award, an NEA fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and creative writing fellowships from the states of Washington, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
Pang Pei was born in Suying, Jiangsu province. He is the author of several collections of poetry and prose, including Whisper (1998), Book of Melancholy (2000), Three-Quarter Rain (2009), and Various Verses (2011). He received the Liu Li’an Poetry Prize and the Rougang Poetry Award.
Daisy Rockwell is an artist, translator, and writer based in the U.S. She has translated the short stories and novel Falling Walls of Hindi writer Upendranath Ashk. She is the author of the novel Taste, and of The Little Book of Terror, a collection of essays and paintings.
K. Satchidanandan is a Malayalam poet born in 1946 in Kerala. He has published novels and drama, over twenty books of poetry, sixteen collections of translations of poetry, and twenty-one collections of essays. His books in English include While I Write: New and Selected Poems. His honors include the Sahitya Akademi Award, Oman Cultural Centre Award, Ashan Award, Odakuyal Prize, Ullor Award, and World Poetry Peace Prize from the UAE. He lives in Delhi.
Shen Haobo was born in 1976. His first two books of poetry, A Handful of Breast (2001) and A Heart Hiding Great Evil (2004), were banned. He leads the Lower Body poetry movement, which aims to shock with crude sexual content, political satire, and other forbidden subjects. His most recent collection of poetry is Command Me to Be Silent. He lives in Beijing and is the founder of the Motie Group, an influential publishing and media company in China.
Shi Tao was born in 1968 in Ningxia. He attended East China Normal University in Shanghai from 1986 to 1991 and is a poet and independent journalist.
Song Lin was born in Fujian in 1959. He graduated from East China Normal University in 1983, where he taught until he was jailed for nine months for his participation in the 1989 student demonstrations in Shanghai. He moved to France in 1991. The poetry editor of Bei Dao’s journal Today since 1992, he now lives in Dali, Yunnan province.
Putu Oka Sukanta was born in Singaraja, Bali, in 1939. His many books include six collections of poetry, six collections of short stories, and several novels. He has also made documentary films. Following Suharto’s coup d’état in 1965, he was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for ten years without trial. In 2012, he received the Hellman/Hammett Award for writers under political persecution, and in 2016 the inaugural Herb Feith Foundation Human Rights Education Award.
Sun Lei was born in 1971 in Ji’nan, Shandong province, and received the 2000 Rougang Poetry Award. His collection Perform (2005) was one of the ten bestselling poetry titles of the year. An accomplished painter and installation artist, he teaches at Central Academy of Fine Arts and Shandong University of Arts.
Jüri Talvet was born in Pänu, Estonia, and studied at the University of Tartu and Leningrad University. His seven books of poetry include the recent Silmad peksavad une seinu (Eyes Beat the Walls of Sleep). In 1997 he received the Juhan Liiv Prize. With the American H. L. Hix, he has edited and translated the poetry of Juhan Liiv (1864–1913), among other writers. He lives in Tartu.
Tan Kexiu was born in Longhui, Hunan province, in 1971 and studied architecture at Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology. He won the first Chang Yao Poetry Award and is the editor-in-chief of the poetry magazine Tomorrow.
Tang Buyu was born in Jiexi, Guangdong province. His poetry collections include Virtues of Devils and Tying Knots. He works as a journalist in Guangzhou.
Tang Danhong was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and is a feminist poet and avant-garde writer and filmmaker. She was awarded the Liu Li’an Poetry Prize in 1995. Her documentary films include At Tsurphu Monastery, Nima Incarnate, At Samsara’s Door, and Zhaxika. In 2014, she published in Taiwan Troubled Times: Voices of Tibetan Refugees. She teaches in Israel at Chinese at Tel Aviv University.
James Vella is British of Maltese descent and has spent substantial time in both territories. His first book of short stories, Devourings, reflects his travels around the world. He lives in Brighton, where he works in the music industry.
Arvis Viguls is a Latvian poet, literary critic, and translator from English, Spanish, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian. His 2009 poetry collection, Istaba (A Room), received the Latvian Writers’ Union Prize for Best Debut Collection and the Poetry Days Award for Book of the Year. His second collection, 5:00, received the 2012 Anna Dagda Foundation Award. He lives and works in Riga.
Asghar Wajahat was born in Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh. He is a Hindi scholar, fiction writer, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and TV scriptwriter. He has published twenty books, including five novels, six plays, five collections of short stories, a travelogue, a collection of street plays, and literary criticism. His collection of short stories in English translation is Lies: Half Told, and his honors include the Katha (UK) International Indu Sharma Katha Samman and Hindi Akademi Best Playwright of the Year.
Wang Suxin was born in Runan County, Henan province, and now lives in Beijing. She left her hometown when she was fourteen and lived in many cities, including Zhengzhou, Chengdu, and Shanghai. Her novellas and short stories have appeared in various magazines. Her story “White Night Photo Studio,” which appeared in Mānoa (winter 2019), won the 2017 Best Short Story in Firestone Literary Awards from the Tianjin Writers Association.
Walter White graduated from Atlanta University in 1916 and a year later helped establish the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He later became NAACP’s executive director. He investigated forty-one lynchings and eight race riots for various newspapers, and his book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) was a major exposé of lynching in the U.S. Following WWII, he published A Rising Wind (1945), which inspired President Truman to desegregate the military in 1948.
Jayde Will is a literary translator of Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian authors. His books of translation include Latvian writer Daina Tabūna’s short-story collection First Time and Latvian poet Inga Pizāne’s poetry collection Having Never Met.
Tsering Woeser is a Tibetan writer and journalist born in Lhasa. She has won the Norwegian Authors Union’s Freedom of Expression Prize, the Association of Tibetan Journalists Silver Medal for her courageous writing on China’s repression in Tibet, and the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award. She was recently given the Prince Claus Award by the Dutch for her courage in reporting about Tibet.
Robert Wrigley was born in East St. Louis, Illinois. His collections of poetry include Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems, winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award; Lives of the Animals, winner of the Poets Prize; Reign of Snakes, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; and In the Bank of Beautiful Sins, winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Idaho.
Xiao Xiao has won numerous poetry awards in China and overseas, such as the Wen Yiduo Poetry Award, the Poetry Award from Beijing Literature magazine, and the Tudor Arghezi international poetry prize in Romania. Her recent books of poetry include Sadder than Sadness, Poems of Xiao Xiao (in Spanish), and Sad Songs from Another World (in Romanian).
Xu Jiang was born in Tianjin in 1967. He graduated from Beijing Normal University in 1989 and in 1991 cofounded the poetry journal Kui (Sun Flower) with other Tianjin poets. He is a journalist and literary editor.
Yan Li was born in Beijing. He is a painter, poet, fiction writer, and essayist. In the mid-1980s, he moved to New York, where he started a magazine publishing experimental poets from China. He was a member of the avant-garde group of visual artists called The Stars and was associated with the Misty Poets. He has published numerous collections of poetry and the novel Meet with 9-11 (2002).
Yang Lian was born in Switzerland and grew up in Beijing. He was sent down to the countryside for reeducation in the 1970s and later became one of the first “underground” Chinese poets. He left China and was living in Australia and New Zealand in 1989 and remained abroad. He has published eleven collections of poems, two of prose, and one of essays. His awards include the Nonino International Literature Prize in Italy and the Flaiano International Poetry Prize.
Yang Xiaobin was born in Shanghai and is a poet, editor, and postmodern theorist. He earned his doctorate from Yale and taught at several American and Chinese universities. His books of poetry include Across the Sunlight Zone (1994), winner of the First Book of Collected Poetry Award in Taiwan, and Landscapes and Plots (2008). He has also published Palimpsest and Trace: Post-Photographism, a collection of poetry about photography.
Yao Feng was born in Beijing in 1958. His books of poetry in English translation include One Love Only Until Death (2017), When the Fish Close Their Eyes (2007), and the chapbook In Brief (2012). His honors include the Rougang Poetry Award and the Ordem Militar de Santiago de Espada medal, presented by the president of Portugal. He is a professor and head of the department of Portuguese at the University of Macau.
John Yau was born in 1950 to Chinese emigrants in Lynn, Massachusetts. He has published over fifty books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. His books include Corpse and Mirror (1983), selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series; Edificio Sayonara (1992); Forbidden Entries (1996); Borrowed Love Poems (2002); Ing Grish (2005); Paradiso Diaspora (2006); Exhibits (2010); and Further Adventures in Monochrome (2012).
Yin Longlong was born in Beijing in 1962. He has published four books of poetry and was a member of the Yuanmingyuan poetry circle in Beijing. Cerebral palsy made him unable to walk, but because he writes about public issues, he lost his monthly welfare stipend.
Yu Xiang was born in Shandong province in the 1970s. She has received the Rougang Poetry Award and the Yulong Poetry Prize. Her works include a chapbook, Sorceress (2002), and the volumes Exhale (2006) and I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust (2014).
Zhao Siyun was born in Shandong in 1967. He is a poet, literary critic, professor at the Communication University of Zhejiang, and deputy director of the Academy of Literature. His recent volumes include A Serious Book (2016).
Zhou Lunyou was born in 1952 in Xichang, Sichuan province. He started writing poetry in the 1970s, founded the avant-garde group Not Not (Feifei) in 1986, and edited its influential journal and subsequent volumes of poetic theory. His poetic manifesto was titled “A Stance of Rejection.” A collection of his poems and theoretical articles, Opening the Door of the Flesh: Not-Not-ism, From Theory to Practice, was published in 1994. He received the Rougang Poetry Award in 1992 and the first Contemporary Chinese Poetry Award from Nanjing University in 2009.
Wayne Karlin is the author of six novels, including Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and The Living in Viet Nam. He coedited the anthologies The Other Side of Heaven, winner of a Critics’ Choice Award; and Love After War. His honors include the Maryland Individual Artist Award in Fiction, Paterson Prize in Fiction, Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in Arts Award, and an NEA fellowship. “Passing the Fire,” his story in this issue, is from his recent novel, A Wolf by the Ears, which received the 2020 Juniper Prize.
