Authors

Poet and journalist Lupe Gómez was born in Fisteus, Galicia in 1972 and lives currently in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia. Camouflage (Chan da Pólvora, 2017), her eleventh book, is already in its third printing in Galicia. It was awarded the prestigious Spanish Critics’ Prize for 2018 for poetry in Galician and the 2018 Gala do Libro Galego Prize for poetry. Her book of poems Pornography was translated into English by Rebeca Lema and Erín Moure and published in Germany in 2013. Gómez is acclaimed for her ability to weave images that startle, for her poetic confrontations with patriarchal thinking, tender and brave, and for the way her works celebrate and honor individual and collective life. Camouflage and Pornography appeared in Spanish (Castilian) translation in 2018.

Brynja Hjálmsdóttir is from Reykjavík, Iceland, and is the author of two books of poetry and a novel. Her first book, Okfruman, was awarded Poetry Book of the Year by the Icelandic Booksellers’ Choice Awards and was nominated for the Icelandic Women’s Literary Award. Kona lítur við (A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder) was nominated for the Maístjarnan Poetry Award. In 2022, Hjálmsdóttir received the Ljóðstafur Jóns úr Vör poetry prize and the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Encouragement Award. Her work has been translated into six languages.

Mihret Kebede is a multidisciplinary artist and poet. She co-founded the Tobiya Poetic Jazz series, the Netsa Art Village Artists Collective, and the Addis Video Art Festival. Her work has been featured in several books, including Wax and Gold: Poetry Jazz, Stille Macht: Silence und Dekolonisierung, Modernist Art in Ethiopia, and Songs We Learn from Trees, the first ever anthology of Amharic poetry in English. Her poems have been published in Washington Square Review, Poetry International, Lyrikline, World Literature Today, Circumference Magazine, and in the chapbook Eight #evolutionarypoems from Dirt Press. Currently, Mihret is a Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna where she positions poetry as a vital tool in historiographical discourses and knowledge production. Her work rethinks, revisits, and analyzes the complex layers of silenced voices over the years in the pursuit of revolution and societal change. #evolutionarypoems is Kebede’s first collection of poems in English and Amharic, and the project continues.

Kulleh Grasi is the pen name of Royston John Kulleh, a poet, singer-songwriter and cultural activist of Iban descent from Kapit, Sarawak. Grasi is a founding member of Nading Rhapsody, an avant-garde Borneo band which draws from the oral traditions of Sarawak to create contemporary world music. His poems have been published in the Malay-English journal, Naratif | Kisah (2016). He was featured as a poet at the KL Literary Festival 2016 and at Nusi Poetry: Mosaic Memories in 2017, and as a poet and panelist at Yang Berani Hidup: Nusantara Festival of Malay Language and Literature 2017. He is currently working on a novel.

Sotero Rivera Avilés, poet, critic, novelist, and essayist, was born in 1933 in Añasco, Puerto Rico. His many books of poetry, including Cuaderno de tierra y hombre, which won the Premio Ventana, and Nada pierdes, caballo viejo (Faena de remedios), are massive in scope and bound to anti-imperialism. Rivera Avilés wrote about being a post-war veteran, demystified archetypes, spoke openly about his disabilities, and left a record of regionalisms from a world that no longer exists. Rivera Avilés co-founded the group Mester de poetas and the literary journal homónima. He passed away in 1994, leaving behind a wife, five children, and three grandchildren, including his translator, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera.

Cuban writer Severo Sarduy was one of the most groundbreaking Latin American literary figures of the twentieth century. Gabriel García Márquez once called him the best writer in the Spanish language. Sarduy was born in Camagüey, Cuba in 1937 and died due to complications with AIDS in 1993.

Vinod Kumar Shukla was born in Rajnandgaon, in central India, in 1937. For most of his working life he taught at Indira Gandhi Agricultural University, Raipur. His first publication, in 1971, was a poetry chapbook Lagbhag Jaihind (Hail India, Almost). He has since published more than a dozen books that include both poetry and fiction. Among his many awards is the Sahitya Akademi Award and the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. His writing has been described by Amit Chaudhuri as “a compelling combination of strangeness, acute observation, love of life, unexpected thinking, and an air of normality that adds to the strangeness.”

Vidyā is the earliest woman who wrote poetry in Sanskrit, living in India between the seventh and ninth centuries. No record of her life exists beyond thirty-odd lyric poems, including some of the best love poems in any language. One scholar coined the term “the Sappho of India” for Vidyā, which succinctly catches both her breathtaking mastery of poetry and the way her writings lie scattered through old anthologies and grammars.

Yang Licai was born in northeastern China. He founded one of China’s first independent advocacy spaces dedicated to experimental music and sound art in Beijing. A recipient of a Jean-Jacques-Rousseau fellowship, he was a resident at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, and he has performed at venues and festivals around the world.