issue 31: monsoon 2025

contributors

László Krasznaorkai is the 2025 Nobel Laureate for Literature. He is author of several books including Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, and Seiobo There Below. His most recent work translated into English is A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East. He is a winner of the Man Booker International Prize.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the KOR-US trilogy: Mirror Nation, which won the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award; the National Book Award winning collection DMZ Colony; and Hardly War. She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Her forthcoming book of prose poems and essays, Freely Frayed, is scheduled to be published in 2026. She is currently based in Berlin.  

Roxana Crisólogo is a renowned Peruvian poet, translator, and cultural worker who was recently selected to participate in the prestigious International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. Her books of poetry include Abajo sobre el cielo, whose Finnish translation was published by Kääntöpiiri, Helsinki, 2001; Animal del camino, Ludy D, Trenes, and Eisbrecher (Icebreaker). Her recent collection Kauneus: la belleza (2021) was republished by Ediciones Nebliplateada, Buenos Aires, 2023 and will appear in Finnish this year. Her book Dónde Dejar Tanto Ruido (2023) was reissued by Gog y Magog Ediciones in 2025. Her latest book Esta canción no termina de salir de mi boca was published by Álbum del Universo Bakterial in 2025. Crisólogo is the founder of Sivuvalo Platform, a multilingual literature association based in Helsinki. Her 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. Her works have been translated into Italian, German, Finnish, French, Swedish, and now English.

Kim Jensen is a Baltimore-based author, poet, professor, and translator who has lived in California, France, and Palestine. Her books include an experimental novel, The Woman I Left Behind (finalist for Forward Magazine book of the year) and two collections of poems, Bread Alone and The Only Thing that Matters (Syracuse University Press). She was a finalist for the New Millennium Writing Awards, Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud Prize, the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, the New American Press Poetry Prize and the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize. Active in transnational peace and social justice movements for decades, Kim’s work has been featured in many publications, including, Gulf Coast, MQR, Boulevard, Lana Turner, Modern Poetry in Translation, Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, Extraordinary Rendition: Writers Speak Out on Palestine, Gaza Unsilenced, Bomb Magazine, and many others. In 2001, she won the Raymond Carver Award for short fiction.

Kim Hyesoon, born in 1955, is one of the most prominent and influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She was the first woman poet to receive the prestigious Kim Su-yong and Midang awards. Kim recently received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize for Autobiography of Death, the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in 2022, and the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Phantom Pain Wings. Her previous books in translation include Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream, All the Garbage of the World, Unite! and others. Her poetry has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Danish, and Swedish. She lives in Seoul and is a professor emeritus at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. 

Aaron Peck is a Canadian author and critic. His books include Jeff Wall: North & West, Letters to the Pacific, and The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis. His criticism has previously appeared in Artforum, The Believer, and the New York Review of Books. He currently contributes to the TLS and Aperture magazine. 

Rahul Santhanam is a mathematician and poet. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rialto, Otoliths, Meniscus and Blackbox Manifold, among other venues. He tweets sporadically at @rahulsanthanam.

Poet-critic-translator-Director Choreographer Vyomesh Shukla was born in 1980, in Banaras. He has translated the works of Noam Chomsky, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Edward Said and also the works of Mahasweta Devi and K. Satchidanandan. Two books of poetry by him are published. He received the ‘Ankur Mishra Memorial Award’ in 2008 and the ‘Bharat Bhushan Agrawal Memorial Award’ in 2009 for poetry, ‘Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad, Kolkata’s Jan Kalyan Samman’ for cultural work. Recently, he has been given the ‘Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar’ of the Sangeet Natak Akademi for theatre direction.

Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist from Raipur, India, currently based in Oxford. His debut collection, Glitchwork (the87 press), comes out in Spring, 2026. Further details on his work can be found here. 

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections Line and Light (Graywolf Press, 2022), Hey, Marfa (Graywolf Press, 2018), Vanishing-Line (Graywolf Press, 2011), and An Aquarium (Graywolf Press, 2008). He is the translator of Bei Dao's Sidetracks (New Directions, 2024); Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile (Phoneme Media, 2015), cotranslated with the author; Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies (Graywolf Press, 2012); Su Shi’s East Slope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008); and Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up (New Directions, 2017). He edited the anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems (New Directions, 2011), Time of Grief: Mourning Poems (New Directions, 2013), and the collection The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman (University Press of New England, 2017). Yang has worked at New Directions Publishing since 2000, where he is currently the Editor-at-Large, and from 2013 to 2024 he also edited books for New York Review Books, where he helped start the NYRB Poets series. He lives in Beacon, New York.