Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His debut poetry collection Imperium (Carcanet Press, UK, 2022) is a winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. His writing has received support from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Civitella Ranieri, Community of Writers, and he earned his MFA in Literary Arts (Poetry) from Brown University. Currently, he is a reader for Poetry magazine and a PhD student in English at Columbia University where he studies experimental poetics and race.
He is also the author of five poetry chapbooks and pamphlets including:Bark, Archive, Splinter (forthcoming); TRAVESTY58 (2022);Katabasis (2020); and Wedding Beasts(2019). He is a winner of the 2022 Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction, the 2021 London Magazine Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. He was also a co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network, a former reviewer for the Poetry Foundation, a mentor for the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics Programme, and a former Contributing Editor for The White Review.
Sandeep Parmar is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool and co-director of Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing. She holds a PhD in English Literature from University College London. Her books include Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern, an edition of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet, 2011), and three books of her own poetry published by Shearsman: The Marble Orchard, Eidolon, winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection, and Faust, which was selected as the Poetry Book Society Choice for Summer 2022. She also edited the Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard (Carcanet, 2016). Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Statesman,the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She was a 2015 BBC New Generation Thinker, co-founder of the Ledbury Poetry Critics programme, a curatorial board member of The Racial Imaginary Institute and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Mi-Ryong Shim (PhD, Columbia University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies at UGA, who teaches a wide range of courses related to Korea and East Asia. A specialist in Korean literature, film, and visual culture, Dr. Shim’s research interests include: spatial politics of globalization, comparative imperialisms, and cultures of militarism. She is currently working on a book that examines Korean transnational mobility – in modes of translation, tourism, migration, and soldiering – in the wartime Japanese empire and Asia. Dr. Shim’s research and writing has been supported by multiple grants and fellowships from national and international institutions, including the Korea Foundation, Social Science Research Council with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Northeast Asia Council.
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born to Sri Lankan Tamils in the North of England and is now the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. He’s the author of two books of verse: The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe, 2019) won a Northern Writers Award, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes. A third collection, Avidya, is out next year: poems toward it can be read in The London Review of Books and Poetry magazine, which also awarded Vidyan their Editor’s Prize for Reviewing. Vidyan writes both peer-reviewed articles and literary journalism, and is interested in what these styles of criticism might learn from each other. Worlds Woven Together, a collection of his public-facing essays on poetry, was a TLS Book of the Year, as was Out of Sri Lanka, which he co-edited with Shash Trevett and Seni Seneviratne — the first ever anthology of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry. Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell UP, 2015) won both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose was published last year by OUP; Vidyan’s next books are Asian/Other, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir for Norton, and Poetry and Opinion, to be published by Cambridge University Press. He helps organise Ledbury Critics, a UK/US scheme for increasing racial diversity in review-culture.
Magdalena Zurawski is the author of the novel The Bruise, which won the Ronald Sukenick Award from FC2 in 2008 and a LAMBDA literary award in 2009, and the collection of poems Companion Animal, which was published by Litmus Press in 2015 and won a Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom (Wave Books 2019) is her most recent poetry collection. The Operating System also released Zurawski’s poem/essay Don’t Be Scared as a chapbook in Summer 2019. Her essay Being Human is an Occult Practice appeared from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2020.
As an undergraduate Magdalena studied with poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Peter Gizzi. She has lived in Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Durham, NC where she ran the Minor American Reading Series. She is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.
Lawrence Venuti works in early modern literature, anglophone and foreign-language poetic traditions, translation theory and history, adaptation studies, and literary translation. He translates from Italian, French, and Catalan. He is a member of the editorial and advisory boards of several journals, including Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication, and Translation Studies. He has edited special journal issues devoted to such topics as translation and minority (The Translator in 1998) and poetry and translation (Translation Studies in 2011). His work has appeared in numerous periodicals in print and online, including Asymptote, boundary 2, Critical Inquiry, The Guardian, Journal of Visual Culture, the Times Literary Supplement, and World Literature Today.
His translation projects have won awards from the PEN American Center (1980), the National Endowment for the Arts (1983, 1999), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1989), and the Guggenheim Foundation (2007). In 1999 he held a Fulbright Senior Lectureship in translation studies at the Universitat de Vic (Spain). In 2008 his version of Catalan writer Ernest Farrés’s book of poems, Edward Hopper, received the Robert Fagles Translation Prize. He has also been a visiting professor at such institutions as Barnard College, Johannes Guttenberg Universität-Mainz, Princeton University, Queen’s University (Belfast), and Università degli Studi di Trento.
