issue 33: monsoon 2026
contributors
Clint Burnham was born in Comox, British Columbia, which is on the unceded traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sahtloot) First Nation, centred historically on kwaniwsam. Recent books include White Lie (fiction, Anvil, 2021), The Goldberg Variations (poetry, New Star, 2023), and Mari Ruti and Climate Change (theory, Routledge, 2026). He teaches in the English Department at Simon Fraser University.
Najwan Darwish (b. 1978) is one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets. Since the publication of his first collection in 2000, his poetry has been hailed across the Arab world and beyond as a singular expression of the Palestinian struggle. He has published eight books in Arabic, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. NYRB Poets published Darwish’s Nothing More to Lose, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, in 2014, which was picked as one of the best books of the year by NPR and nominated for several awards. His second major collection in English, Exhausted on the Cross, was published by NYRB Poets in 2021, with a Foreword by Raúl Zurita, and was awarded the Sarah Maguire Prize. Darwish lives between Haifa and his birthplace, Jerusalem.
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an Egyptian-American translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world who translates from Arabic, French, and German. He has received the Sarah Maguire Prize for poetry in translation, an NEA translation grant, PEN Center USA's translation prize, Poetry Magazine's translation prize, a Fulbright research fellowship, and residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff International Center for the Arts, among other honors. His book-length translations include work by Najwan Darwish (Palestine), Adonis (Syria), Dunya Mikhail (Iraq), and Rabee Jaber (Lebanon). He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice. The online hub for his work is www.kareemjamesabuzeid.com
Elvira Hernández, pseudonym of María Teresa Adriasola, is a Chilean poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is one of the most important voices of contemporary poetry in the Southern Cone and the Chilean neo-avant-garde. Some of her most important works include: ¡Arre! Halley ¡Arre! (Giddy up, Halley!) (1986), La bandera de Chile (The Chilean Flag) (1991), Santiago Waria (1992), and Pájaros desde mi ventana (Birds From My Window) (2018). She is the recipient of the Jorge Tellier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Award (Chile 2024).
Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún.
Alec Schumacher is Associate Professor at Gonzaga University. His research interests are Latin American poetry, translation, and avant-garde poetics. His publications have been focused on Chilean poets Juan Luis Martínez and Elvira Hernández. His translations include works by Jorge Arbeleche, Elvira Hernández, and Luis Correa-Díaz. In 2019, he published The Chilean Flag, a translation of Elvira Hernández’s book which was nominated for the National Translation Award in Poetry 2020 by The American Literary Translators Association.
Chus Pato is a celebrated Galician poet. Seven of her twelve books of poetry are translated into English, including Sonora (Veliz Books, 2026, recipient in original Galician of the Spanish National Poetry Prize in 2024) and The Face of the Quartzes (Veliz Books, 2021). Her books have also been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, Portuguese and Bulgarian, with individual works in many other languages. She has performed throughout Europe and South America, Canada, USA, Mexico, Cuba, as well as in India and north Africa. She lives and writes in central Galicia in the northwest of Spain.
Erín Moure is a Canadian poet and translator. Often hybrid in form, her books explore the possibility of queer citizenship as well as the potentialities of language/s. She has published 19 books of poetry and translations of more than 25 books of poetry by others from Galician, Spanish, French, and Portuguese (including Nicole Brossard, Andrés Ajens, Chantal Neveu, Rosalia de Castro, Chus Pato, Fernando Pessoa). Her most recent book is Theophylline: a poetic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (Anansi, 2023), and her most recent translation is of Galician poet Chus Pato’s Sonora (Veliz Books, 2026).
Rajalakshmi N Rao
Slovenian writer Aleš Šteger has published seven books of poetry, three novels, and two books of essays. A Chevalier des Artes et Lettres in France and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry book, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, the 2007 Rožanc Award for the best Slovenian book of essays, and the 2016 International Bienek Prize. His work has been translated into over 15 languages, including Chinese, German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. He has published four books in English: The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 as a Lannan Foundation selection and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award; Berlin, a collection of lyric essays, appeared from Counterpath Press in 2015; Essential Baggage, a book of prose poems, appeared from Equipage in England in 2016; and the novel Absolution, which appeared in England in 2017. He also has worked in the field of visual arts (most recently with a large scale installation at the International Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India), completed several collaborations with musicians (Godalika, Uroš Rojko, Peter N. Gruber), and collaborated with Peter Zach on the film Beyond Boundaries.
Gozo Yoshimasu is a poet born in 1939. Since his debut in 1964 with the book Shuppatsu (Departure), Gozo has led the Japanese poetic scene for more than half a century with his unconventional expressions that push the borders of literary language. He has received a number of literary and cultural awards, honors and prizes, such as the Takami Jun Prize (1971), the Rekitei Prize (1979), the Purple Ribbon Medal (2003), the Imperial Prize and the Japan Art Academy Prize (2015), and the Serpentine ✖︎ FLAG Art Foundation Prize (2026) for the decades-long distinctive practice that combines poetry with other forms of art. His work has been translated into English, French, Italian and several other languages.
Sayuri Okamoto is a translator, curator, and founder of Alba, a studio and gallery in Kyoto. She has been translating poetry and writings of Gozo Yoshimasu for more than a decade, and received the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant 2014 for her translation project of Dear Monster: The Naked Poetry of Gozo. She is currently lecturing at Doshisha Women's College of Liberal Arts.