Meet Our Contributors | Issue 63:4 | Fall 2024 – Michigan Quarterly Review

Meet Our Contributors | Issue 63:4 | Fall 2024

ALI ABDEDDINE (he/him) earned his PhD in Amazigh poetry from the University of Hassan II Casablanca, Morocco in 2023. His dissertation investigates Arab hegemony on written Amazigh literature forms. He has 10 years of experience teaching Tashelhit and Arabic (MSA and Darija) to Arabic Flagship, CLS, and Fulbright scholars as well as independent students. Dr. Abdeddine grew up in Douar Anguizem, a small village in the High Atlas Mountains in Essaouira Province, Morocco.


SOURI AHMADOU is an Iranian poet whose work has appeared in different journals in Iran. She is currently a staff writer for the Jahan-e Ketab — a national magazine that publishes book reviews — and continues to contribute to literary magazines. Ahmadlou’s first collection of poems The Cherry Ladder Does Not Turn the Moon Red was published in 2007 by Ahang-e Digar Press. Her second collection A Stone for a Game of Seven-Stones was published by the Morvarid Press in 2020.

SNEZANA MLADENOVSKA ANGJELKOV, born in Skopje, is a graduate of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. Her debut novel, Eleven Women, won the 2011 “Novel of the Year” award, marking her as Macedonia’s first debutante to achieve this distinction. Her two other published novels are Shut Up with Your Mouth Open and The People and Not the City. Her work is featured in the Best European Fiction and the Contemporary Macedonian Fiction anthologies from Dalkey Archive Press.


YAHYA ASHOUR يحيى عاشور is an exiled award-winning Gazan poet, born on April 22, 1998. He is a 2022 honorary fellow at the University of Iowa and author of the e-book “A Gaza of Siege & Genocide.” He has a poetry collection and a children’s book in Arabic, and contributed to anthologies and journals. He has read at over 33 U.S. universities, including Princeton, Stanford, UPenn, and UCLA. His poetry was translated into several languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, and Bengali.

ANTONELLA ANEDDA is an Italian poet and translator, a native of Sardinia, and author of six books of poetry including Historiae and Archipelago, and two of prose. She is the winner of the prestigious Viareggio Prize and teaches Italian Literature at the University of Lugano.

MARILIA ARNAUD is a fiction writer living in João Pessoa, Brazil. Arnaud has published award-winning short story collections and three novels: Suite of Silence, Liturgy of the End, and The Secret Bird, winner of the 2021 Kindle Prize in Literature in Brazil. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, Asymptote Journal, Exchanges Journal, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. Her short story collection, The Book of Affects, will be published by Sundial House in December 2024.

Miron Białoszewski (1922–1983) was born in Warsaw, Poland, and survived the German destruction of the city in 1944, an experience he recounts in A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (1970). One of the most significant members of the Polish avant-garde, Białoszewski is the author of poetry, prose, and theater pieces that play with genre boundaries and explore the poetic possibilities of everyday speech. A selection of his work will appear in English from NYRB in 2025.

ADELI BLOCK (she/they) is a PhD Candidate in linguistic anthropology at the University of Michigan and has lived, studied, and worked in Morocco for over four years. Their research concerns the social consequences of language policy change after the Indigenous language, Tamazight, became an official language in 2011. Adeli graduated from the University of Texas at Austin as an Arabic Flagship Scholar, majoring in Middle Eastern languages and cultures and geography.


INE BOERMANS grew up in the Dutch countryside and studied Media Arts at the Kunstacademie. Her debut novel, A Long List of Shortcomings, was published in 2021 and nominated for the Hebban Debut Prize. In 2022 her second novel, Love Interbellum, was published and nominated for the 2024 Amarte Literary Prize. Boermans’ writing has appeared in multiple Dutch-language literary magazines. She writes a weekly column for the VPRO Gids and is currently working on her third novel.

NICOLE BROSSARD, born in Montréal in 1943, is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Twice awarded the Governor General Award, she has published more than 35 books, including Mauve DesertThe Aerial Letter, and Notebook of Roses and Civilization. Many of her books have been translated into various languages. In 2019, the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry awarded her the Lifetime Recognition Award. Her most recent books in English are Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (Coach House Books, 2020) and Distantly (Omnidawn, 2022). In 2022, she received the prestigious Prix Gilles-Corbeil, also for lifetime recognition.

BIBIANA CANDIA has published the poetry collections La rueda del hamster (Torremozas, 2013) and Las trapecistas no tenemos novio (Torremozas, 2016); the short story collection El pie de Kafka (Torremozas, 2015); and the metafictional work Fe de erratas (Franz, 2014). Azucre (Pepitas de Calabaza, 2021) is her first novel.


AARON COLEMAN is a poet, translator, and scholar of the African Diaspora. He is the translator of Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and the author of Red Wilderness (Four Way Books, 2025), among other titles. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the American Literary Translators Association, Coleman is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.


HELEN COVA is a Venezuelan-Icelandic multidisciplinary writer. Helen writes interchangeably in Spanish, English, and Icelandic, and her work encompasses short stories, children’s literature, poetry, and plays. Cova’s pieces have additionally been published in anthologies and literary magazines, both in Iceland and abroad, including Ós—The Journal, Tímarit máls og menningar, Skaldreki, Ordskælv, and The Polaris Trilogy, an anthology destined to land on the south pole of the moon as part of the Lunar Codex project. 

ROXANA CRISÓLOGO is a poet, translator, and cultural promotor whose books of poetry include Abajo sobre el cielo (Lima, 1999) whose Finnish translation was published by Kääntöpiiri, Helsinki, 2001; Animal del camino (Lima, 2001); Ludy D (Lima, 2006); Trenes (Mexico, 2010, republished by Ediciones Libros del Cardo, Chile in 2019); and Eisbrecher (Icebreaker) Hochroth Verlag (Berlin, 2017). An anthology of her poetry has been translated into Italian, Sotto sopra il cielo (Down above the Sky) was published by Seri Editore. Un jour je m´en irai sans rien emporter is a sample of her poems translated into French published by Éditions KLAC.  Kauneus: la belleza (Intermezzo Tropical, Lima, 2021) was republished by Ediciones Nebliplateada, Buenos Aires, 2023. Her latest book is Dónde Dejar Tanto Ruido (2023). Crisólogo is the founder of Sivuvalo Platform, a multilingual literature association based in Helsinki. She was president of the association of Finnish left-wing artists and writers, Kiila. She was recently awarded a grant from the Finnish Kone Foundation to work on the Sivuvalo project. Crisólogo literary work and projects have been supported by the Finnish foundations, Kone Foundation, Finnish Literature Exchange, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Kari Mattila Säätiö and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. She lives and works in Helsinki.

MARISSA DAVIS is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky. Her translations are published or forthcoming in Modern Poetry in Translation, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Mid-American Review, The Common, Rhino, American Chordata, Northwestern Review, and The Offing. Her full-length debut, End of Empire, is forthcoming in 2025 from Penguin Books. Davis holds an MFA from New York University, and she was a 2023 ALTA Translation Mentorship Fellow.


MORTEZA DEHGHANI is a poet and literary translator writing in English and Persian. He is currently an MFA student at the University of British Columbia and teaches at the University of Waterloo. Morteza is the author of Send My Roots Rain, The Whale Who Breaks the Skin of Morning, and After Rumi and the Flute Concerto.


HAGER BEN DRISS is Associate Professor at the University of Tunis. She teaches Anglophone literature, and her research interests center on gender and postcolonial studies. She is editor of Women, Violence, and Resistance (2017) and Mobilizing Narratives: Narrating Injustices of (Im)Mobility (2021). She has published several articles on Arabic and Tunisian literature and translated numerous Tunisian poets’ texts into English, including work by Sghaier Ouled Ahmed and Amel Moussa.


ILZE DUARTE is a recipient of the Sundial House 2024 Literary Translation Award, which includes the upcoming publication of her translation of Marília Arnaud’s short story collection The Book of Affects. Her translations of works by Arnaud and other Brazilian authors appear in Words Without Borders, MAYDAY Magazine, Asymptote, Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, and elsewhere. Her own short story collection, The Heart Beats Faster, will be published by Betty Books in 2025. She lives in California.


PHILLIP DUPESOVSKI is a translator based in Sydney, Australia. His work has appeared in Circumference, Cordite, Firmament, Ancient Exchanges, and elsewhere.


STEPHANIE FERRAT is a painter and poet from Aix-en-Provence, France, currently residing in the Var. In both her visual and literary art, she expresses a love for and devoted attention to the natural world. Books of her poetry have been published by La Lettre volée, Fissile, and L’atelier La Feugraie. Ferrat has combined her diverse artistic interests in creating her own small press, Les Mains, which publishes intricately illustrated books of poetry.

Fathi Gasmi, known by his nom de plume ADAM FETHI (b. 1957), stands as a prominent figure in Tunisian poetry. His oeuvre, deeply imbued with the spirit of resistance, emerged from and resonated with the tumultuous political climate of Tunisia in the 1970s and 1990s. His works include Ughniat al-Naqabi al-Fasih (Song of the eloquent unionist, 1986), Anachid li Zahrat al-Ghubar (Songs for the dust rose, 1991), and Nafikhu al-Zujaj al-A’maa (The blind glassblower, 2011). His literary merit earned him the 2019 Sargon Boulus Award for Poetry and Translation.

CAROLINE FROH is a literary translator from the German. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a former ALTA Travel Fellow, and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was also one of the 2020-2021 Provost’s Postgraduate Visiting Writers. Her writing and translations have appeared in numerous journals, and her translation of Milena Michiko Flašar’s novel, Mr. Katō Plays Family, was released by Forge Books in 2023. Caroline lives and works in the mountains of northern New Mexico.


NICOLÁS GUILLÉN (b. 1902, Camagüey, Cuba; d. 1989, Havana) was a prolific poet, writer, and activist hailed as the National Poet of revolutionary Cuba. He is the author of more than ten collections of poetry, including Motivos de son, and the first English-language anthology of his early work, Cuba Libre, was translated by Langston Hughes and Ben Frederic Carruthers.

BRADLEY HARMON is a writer, translator, and scholar of Nordic and German literature, philosophy, and cultural history. A PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University, he has been an ALTA Emerging Translator Mentee, an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow to Sweden, and a Fulbright Fellow to Germany.


SARAH TIMMER HARVEY is a translator and writer currently based in Woodstock, New York. Their translation of Jente Posthuma’s novel What I’d Rather Not Think About was published by Scribe in 2023 and shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize. A translation of Thistle by Nadia de Vries was published by the New Menard Press in 2024, and a translation of Jente Posthuma’s People With No Charisma will be published in 2025.


KIM HOYEONJAE (김호연재 / 金浩然齋) (1681–1722) is one of the few prolific, well-documented Korean women poets from the Joseon dynasty and one of the few whose work has survived. She wrote over two hundred poems, which her daughters-in-law copied and preserved. Despite her aristocratic background, Kim had to cope with an impoverished life because of her absent husband who kept failing kwageo (Joseon’s civil exam at the time) and national unrest. She wrote poems about such financial challenges, including “Begging the Magistrate for Rice.”

RICHARD JACKSON is the author of seventeen books of poetry including The Heart as Framed: New & Select Poems as well as four chapbooks and twelve books of essays, interviews, translations, editions, and anthologies. Winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, and NEH fellowships and the Order of Freedom from the President of Slovenia for his literary and humanitarian work, he has also edited thirty chapbooks from Eastern European poets. His poems have been translated into seventeen languages.

LHOUCINE JANTI was born in the Moroccan village of Achtouken in 1900. Fascinated with Amazigh music, he grew up playing the lutar and the rebab. After befriending Frenchmen as a wage laborer in Casablanca, he earned the nickname Janti after the French gentil for his kind manners. He took his rebab and sang poetry criticizing French colonialism and was imprisoned in Casablanca, Tiznit, and Agadir. After independence, he continued to compose poetry and died in 1975.

KIM JENSEN is a Baltimore-based writer, poet, educator, and translator who has lived in California, France, and Palestine. Her books include an experimental novel, The Woman I Left Behind, and two collections of poems, Bread Alone and The Only Thing That Matters. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Boulevard, Gulf Coast, Modern Poetry in Translation, Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, ANMLY, BOMB, and many others. Kim is currently Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Community College of Baltimore County, where she co-founded an interdisciplinary literacy initiative that demonstrates the vital connection between classroom learning and social justice in the broader community.


FAKHRI KAWAR فخري قعوار is a Jordanian satirist, journalist, and former member of parliament. Known as the “father of the Jordanian short story” and one of the most prolific Arab writers of the past century, he has published ten collections of short stories, three novels, and over eleven thousand articles for Arab press. His stories have been translated into Russian, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. An English translation of stories by Khaled Rajeh is in the works.

STEVEN G. KELLMAN is Professor of Comparative Literature and Jack and Laura Richmond Endowed Faculty Fellow in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His books include Rambling Prose: Essays (Trinity University Press); Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism (Purdue University Press); Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton); The Translingual Imagination (University of Nebraska Press); and The Self‑Begetting Novel (Columbia University Press). He received the National Book Critics Circle’s Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

LARISSA KYZER is a writer and Icelandic-to-English literary translator. Her translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s A Fist or a Heart won the American Scandinavian Foundation’s 2019 translation prize. The same year, she was a Translator in Residence at Princeton University. Her recent translations include Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir’s The Fires (2023) and Fríða Ísberg’s The Mark (2024). She is a board member of the American Literary Translators Association and runs the virtual Women+ in Translation reading series Jill!

LINDA LÊ (1963-2022) was born in Vietnam and fled to France after the Fall of Saigon. She was the recipient of several French literary awards, including the prix de la Vocation (1990), prix Fénéon (1997), prix Wepler (2010), prix Renaudot du livre de poche (2011) and prix Prince Pierre de Monaco (2019). Lê was the author of over thirty works of literature, three of which are published in English: Slander (tr. Esther Allen), The Three Fates (tr. Mark Polizzotti), and A Tale of Love (tr. Siân Robyns).

MARGAREE LITTLE’s translations of Osip Mandelstam’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review and Asymptote; her translation of The Voronezh Notebooks was a finalist for the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. Her first book, Rest (Four Way Books, 2018), won the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Award. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Kenyon Review, the Camargo Foundation, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, among others.


PAVLINA MANAVSKA is a lecturer and translator of Macedonian and German. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and an MA in Applied Linguistics from TU Dortmund in Germany. Her work has been featured in Asymptote and the Green European Journal. She lives in Cologne.


OSIP MANDELSTAM, one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, published his first book, Stone, in 1913. He continued to publish, but his work was increasingly censored under the Soviet regime. In 1934, he was arrested and sent with his wife into exile in Voronezh. Arrested again in 1938, he is thought to have died in a transit camp. The Voronezh Notebooks, preserved by his widow, remained unpublished in Russia until the 1980s.

MARIELLA MEHR was born in Zurich in 1947 to a Yenish mother and Jewish-Romani father, and was the second generation of her family subjected to the state-sponsored forced assimilation campaign Kinder der Landstrasse, or “Children of the Country Road,” which separated Yenish and other Traveler (“Gypsy”) children from their families with the goal of curtailing their nomadic way of life. Mehr’s experiences drove her to use her writing to explore structural violence and systems of power. Over the course of a three-decade career, Mehr drew from a dark interior space, inventing new ways of depicting pain and writing the body. Her contribution to Swiss letters has been recognized by numerous awards, including the Bündner Literature Prize, the Schiller Foundation Prize, and two lifetime literary achievement awards – the Pro-Litteris Prize and official recognition from the city of Zurich in 2012 and 2017, respectively. Mehr sadly passed away in September of 2022.

Palestinian poet ZAKARIA MOHAMMED was born in the village of al-Zawiya near Nablus, Palestine, in 1951. He was a journalist, editor, novelist, playwright, and prolific poet. He authored nine volumes of poetry, including Kushtban (Dar Al-Nasher Press, 2014) and A Date for the Crows in 2022. In 1994, after twenty-five years in exile, he returned to his homeland and lived in Ramallah. He died there in August 2023.

JILA MOSSAED was born in Tehran in 1948 and has been based in Sweden since 1986, writing in both Swedish and Persian. In 2018 she was elected to the Swedish Academy and in 2023 she was a host for the famous Swedish radio show Summer on P1. The recipient of many literary prizes in Sweden and across Europe, her tenth poetry collection in Swedish, I Belonged to the Winds, appeared in 2024.

ROBIN MUNBY is a literary translator based in Madrid. His translations from Spanish, Russian, and Asturian have appeared in the Glasgow Review of Books, Wasafiri, Subtropics, World Literature Today, Poetry Ireland, and World Poetry Review. In December 2023, he was the inaugural resident at the Residencia Lliteraria Xixón.


Born in 1989 in Okayama City, SHIZUKA OMORI is one of the leading Japanese poets of her generation. She writes tanka, following and experimenting with the classical Japanese poetic structure of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. She is the author of three books of poems: Burning the Palm of a Hand (2013), Camille (2018), and Hectare (2022).


SUPHIL LEE PARK (수필 리 박 / 秀筆 李 朴) is the author of Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), which won the 2020 Marystina Santiestevan Prize, and Still Life (Factory Hollow Press, 2023), which won of the 2022 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She’s also the translator of If You Live to 100, You Might As Well Be Happy (2024) by Rhee Kun Hoo, published with Union Square Books and Ebury, UK. Find more about her at suphil-lee-park.com.


FRANCE PREŠEREN (1800–1849) was born in the town of Vrba, Slovenia, and is considered their national poet. One of his poems is the national song and another is a short romance epic, The Baptism on the Savica. Often compared to Keats, he was a leader of European Romanticism. These sonnets may have been written in response to a failed relationship with his beloved Julija.

KHALED RAJEH is a writer and literary translator from Baakleen, Lebanon. He holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where he is pursuing a PhD.


ISMAEL RAMOS is a Galician-language poet, author of the collections Os fillos da fame (2016), Lumes (2017), and Lixeiro (2021), for which he won the Miguel Hernández National Poetry Prize. His debut story collection, A parte fácil (2023), was released with editions in Galician, Spanish, and Catalan. His work has been translated into English, Spanish, Catalan, Finnish, French, Hungarian, and Portuguese and is included in various anthologies and magazines.


JACOB ROGERS is a translator of Galician and Spanish. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. His translation of Manuel Rivas’s The Last Days of Terranova was published by Archipelago Books in 2022, and the translation of Berta Dávila’s The Dear Ones published by 3TimesRebel Press in 2023. His translation of Xavier Queipo’s Orange Dream and Other Stories is forthcoming from Sublunary Editions.


JUDITH SANTOPIETRO is a Mexican writer who was awarded the writing residency at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2022. Her book Tiawanaku. Poems from the Mother Coqa, translated by Ilana Luna, was a finalist for the 2020 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation. She has published in the Anuario de poesía mexicana 2006, Rio Grande Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. Santopietro has carried out research residencies in Mexico, the US, the Netherlands, and Bolivia and is writing a novel on Indigenous migration in the US and a documentary poetry book on forced disappearance in Mexico.


YUKI TANAKA’s debut poetry collection, Chronicle of Drifting, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2025. He has also co-translated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, forthcoming from Princeton University Press (The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation series) in November 2024. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.


LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen), which won the 2018 Washington State Book Award; Kaan and Her Sisters (Trio House Press); and Something About Living (University of Akron Press, 2024), winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. Her writing has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Poets.org, Protean, and Prairie Schooner and in the anthologies The Long Devotion and We Call to the Eye and the Night. She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series Poems from Palestine at The Baffler and is currently curating a series on Palestinian writers for Words Without Borders titled Against Silence. www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com


CHRIS TYSH is a poet and playwright whose latest publications are 26 Tears (co-written with George Tysh), Hotel des Archives: A Trilogy, and Derrida’s In/Voice. She lives in Detroit and serves as poetry editor for Three Fold, an arts quarterly journal, available at https://threefoldpress.org.


MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI is a poet and prose writer. Her most recent poetry collection is The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom (Wave Books). She was a 2022–2023 Fulbright Scholar in Poland, where she traced family war histories for her current book project and began translating poet Miron Białoszewski’s prose work, Heart Attack. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia.

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