issue 31: monsoon 2025

contributors

Luisa Futoransky is an Argentine writer born in Buenos Aires, 1939. She has been living in Paris for about 40 years. In France she was a lecturer at the Pompidou Center in Paris and a journalist for the AFP press agency. She was decorated by the French government with the rank of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. For five years she lived in China and Japan where she worked as a journalist at Radio Beijing, NHK and at the Musashino University of Music, Tokyo, as a professor of opera staging. Her novels Son cuentos chinos and De Pe a Pa o De Pekín a París are the result of that stay. Currently, since 2008, she has been in charge of the Spanish edition of the quarterly magazine Patrimonio Mundial de la UNESCO. 

Christine Herzer is a poet and visual artist. Her works (written drawings, poems, objects, installations, performances, and workshops) illuminate and enact a human question about capacity and constraint in seeing and speaking. Herzer practices language within contexts and media-scapes as mystery, material, and crisis. Her quest brings consolation: What’s the weight of today? How long is happy? Herzer holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars (USA), and is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, most recently, ORANGE, which was published by Ugly Duckling Presse (USA). She lives and works in Paris.

Rebecca Kosick is a poet, translator, and associate professor of comparative poetry and poetics at the University of Bristol. She is the author of the poetry collection Labor Day (Golias Books 2020) and editor-translator of Hélio Oiticica's Secret Poetics (Soberscove Press and Winter Editions 2023). Her next book, Detroit's Alternative Press: Dispatches from the Avant-Garage is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.

Jeannette Lozano Clariond is a poet, translator, and founder of the Vaso Roto Editions in Spain and Mexico. Along with the Gonzalo Rojas National Poetry Prize, Jeannette L. Clariond has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship; the Arts Award from the University of Nuevo León; the Efraín Huerta National Poetry Prize; the Best Translation Award for her book collaboration with Harold Bloom: The School of Wallace Stevens: A Profile of Contemporary American Poetry; the Juan de Mairena Award from the University of Guadalajara; the International Latino Best Book Award for her translation of Anne Carson's Decreation; the San Juan de la Cruz International Poetry Prize; the Pilar Fernández Labrador International Poetry Prize of Salamanca; and the BIBLOS Award for Merit.

A writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, Gander has been a signal voice for environmental poetics. His most recent books are Mojave Ghost: a Novel Poem and Across/Ground: Photographs by Lukas Felzmann.

Golan Haji is a Kurdish translator and poet. Born in Amuda, in Syrian-Kurdistan in 1977, he currently lives in Paris. He has published five collections of poetry in Arabic, including The Word Rejected (Khan al-Janoub, 2023). A selection of his poetry, translated in collaboration with Stephen Watts, was published as A Tree Whose Name I Don't Know (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2017). Most recently, Marilyn Hacker's English translations of his poems have appeared in Another Room to Live In (Litmus Press, 2024), a multilingual collection of poetry by fifteen contemporary Arab poets. 

His poems and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and publications in translations by Fady Joudah, Marilyn Hacker, Stephen Watts, and Huda Fakhreddine, among others.

Dhul Rumma (or Dhu ar-Rumma, or Dhu l’Rumma) is a poet thought to have lived in the southeastern part of the Najd in the early eighth century (AD). Of his life, one 13th commentator wrote: “Reports of Dhul Rumma are numerous, so concision is of the essence.

He died in 117 AH, and when his end was upon him, he said, I am grown halfway old; I have forty years.”

Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English who lives in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Catalunya. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared widely. His most recent publications include Sleep Phase (Two Lines Press, 2025), a novel by Mohammed Kheir, a curated selection of poems by Wadih Saadeh entitled A Horse at the Door (Tenement Press, 2024), Strangers in Light Coats (Seagull Press, 2023), which is a collection of poems by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (And Other Stories Press, 2023), a joint winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press, 2022), in collaboration with Yasmine Seale.

His translation of Samer Abu Hawwash’s collection From The River To The Sea is forthcoming from Banipal Books in July this year.

Togara Muzanenhamo is a Zimbabwean poet born in Lusaka, Zambia. His first collection of poems ‘Spirit Brides’ was shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Muzanenhamo’s second collection ‘Gumiguru’ was shortlisted for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. His third collection ‘Textures’ won the National Arts and Merit Award for Literature. Muzanenhamo’s fourth collection ‘Virga’ won the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry and was an Irish Times Best Poetry Book of the Year, and a Poetry Society Autumn Recommendation.

Karthika Naïr is a poet, playwright, fabulist and dance librettist. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reworking of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (Fiction). Les Oiseaux électriques de Pothakudi (Electric Birds of Pothakudi) – illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet – won the 2023 Prix Felipé for ‘ecological children’s literature’, and was shortlisted for the Jugendliteraturpreis the same year. 

Naïr’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals like Granta, LARB, Poetry Magazine, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, the Forward Book of Poetry 2017 and the forthcoming Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Poets. A Different Distance, renga co-written with the American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker, is her latest collection.  

The performances Naïr has scripted include Urja Desai Thakore’s ROOH: Within Her (2024); PETTEE: Storybox (2024) with novelist Deepak Unnikrishnan; the play Beneath the Music directed by Jay Emmanuel (2023); Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa (2022), a queer reimagining of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly; and several of Akram Khan’s award-winning dance pieces, like Until the Lions (2016), adapted from a chapter of her own book. 

Sarah Riggs is a poet, filmmaker, artist and translator, born in New York where she is now based, after having spent over a decade in Paris. 

Before directing Six Lives: A Cinepoem, she produced The Tangier 8 at the Cinémathèque de Tanger in Morocco, which was screened at the Berlin Film Festival and the Tate Modern Museum among other international venues.

She is the author of eight books of poetry in English: Waterwork (Chax, 2007), Chain of Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (Reality Street, 2007), 60 Textos (Ugly Duckling, 2010), Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck, 2012), Pomme & Granite (1913 Press, 2015) which won a 1913 poetry prize, Eavesdrop (Chax, 2020) and The Nerve Epistle, fall 2021, Lines (forthcoming with Winter Editions, 2025). She is the author of the book of essays Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop, & O’Hara (Routledge, 2002), and has translated and co-translated eight books of contemporary French poetry into English, including (not most recently) Etel Adnan’s TIME which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020.

Rodrigo Rojas Bollo (b. 1971) is a Chilean poet and translator. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where he studied with Philip Levine, Derek Walcott, Sharon Olds, and Elizabeth Alexander. He is the author of five poetry collections and two books of essays, including one on Mapuche-language poets. His translations have been featured in Barbaric, Vast & Wild (Black Widow Press, 2015) and The Serpent and the Fire (2024), Jerome Rothenberg’s final anthology. From 2003 to 2009, he was a contributing editor at Rattapallax Magazine, publishing South American poetry in translation. This year, two new works are forthcoming: Viaje al jardín de la noche (Pez Espiral, 2025), and The Child Langston Hughes Imagined, a long poem on Gabriela Mistral’s translation into English, to appear in Brick, the international literary journal based in Toronto. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Diego Portales University in Santiago.

Jessica Sequeira is a poet, historian and literary translator. Her collections of poetry, novels and essays include Taal, Golden Jackal, A Furious Oyster, Rhombus and Oval, Other Paradises, A Luminous History of the Palm and Jazz of the Affections. She has translated more than thirty books by Latin American authors, including Augusto Monterroso, Daniel Guebel, Winétt de Rokha, Teresa Wilms Montt and Gabriela Mistral. She holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she studied the influence of India in the poetics of Latin American writers, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. As part of the musical group Lux Violeta, she creates songs with lyrics from poetry, drawing on Latin American and Asian rhythms.