contributors

Daouda Ndiaye was born in Medina, in the heart of Dakar, capital city of Senegal (West Africa). Jurist, he is also doctor of Educational Science – Université Paris 8 Vincennes St-Denis. Poet in the wolof language, his mother tongue, he translates his poems into French, English, and Spanish. His published works include : Keppaarug Guy Gi / Under the Baobab Tree. Poems in Wolof (Paris : L’Harmattan 1999), and Gàddaay Gi/ The Exile. Poems in Wolof (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2003).  Wolof poems, Saawo yi / The sillons of the Mind, published in 2010 ; Baatu garab, The voice of a tree in 2024. Daouda Ndiaye also translates into wolof poetry from the Black diaspora. He is currently working on The Return of the Homing Pigeon, an anthology of selected poems by African American and Caribbean writers and their translations in Wolof.

David Grundy is a poet and scholar. He is the author of the critical books A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco, 1944–Present (Oxford University Press, 2024); A True Account (The 87 Press, 2023), a book of poetry; and Present Continuous (Pamenar Press, 2022), a book of lyric essays; and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He co-runs the small press Materials/Materialien.

Algerian poet and anthropologist Habib Tengour was born in 1947 in Mostaganem. He has more than fifteen works of poetry, prose, theatre, and essays to his name published by Algerian and French publishing houses and in poetry magazines. His work has been translated into English, German, Arabic, Italian, Macedonian, and Dutch. He divides his time between Algeria and France. He translates poets from English, German and Arabic. Tengour won the Dante European Poetry Prize in 2016 for his entire poetic work.  In December 2023, the Laurentum Cultural Centre awarded him the "Dante Alighieri" Prize in Rome. He edits the ‘Poèmes du Monde’ series published by APIC (Algiers); the first edition of seven collections of poetry launched in 2018.

Iestyn Tyne (he/his) was raised in Llŷn but now lives in Waunfawr with his family and works from the Caernarfon area. He is a writer, a musician, a translator, artist and editor. He co-founded and co-edits Cyhoeddiadau’r Stamp, an independent and co-operative Welsh language publishing house. He’s performed his work extensively across Wales and beyond, including performances in South America, Asia, Europe and Africa. He won the Eisteddfod yr Urdd Crown in 2016 and the Chair in 2019, becoming the first and one of the only two to have won the two main literary prizes at the event. Between 2019 and 2023 he was the National Eisteddfod’s first poet in residence. With Leo Drayton, he is co-author of Robyn (Y Lolfa, 2021) in the Y Pump series (forthcoming in English via Firefly Press in 2025, and winner of Wales Book of the Year and Tir Na n-Og awards), and is co-editor of Welsh [Plural] (Repeater, 2022), a collection of essays on the future of Wales. His most recent full collection of poetry, Stafelloedd Amhenodol (Cyhoeddiadau’r Stamp, 2021), was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year in 2022, and was more recently published in English translation as Unspecified Spaces (Broken Sleep Books, 2023). His work has been translated into numerous other languages including Irish, German, Hungarian, Malayalam, Greek, Turkish and others. His most recent pamphlet of poems is Dysgu Nofio (Cyhoeddiadau’r Stamp, 2023), which was chosen for Wales Literature Exchange’s translation selections for Autumn 2023, and he is a Future Wales Fellow for 2023-25. In 2024, he was appointed Caernarfon’s first Town Poet.

Kashif Sharma-Patel is a poet, writer and co-founding head editor of the87press. Their debut collection is furnish, entrap (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). Kashif runs a newsletter culture hawker.

Mani Rao is the author of eleven books of poetry and three books in translations. 

Sam Weselowski is a poet and essayist from Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of I Love My Job Too (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2024), Triple Rainforest (Veer2, 2023), and Love Poems <3 (Distance No Object, 2021). He lives in the West Midlands, United Kingdom.

Sohini Basak’s first book We Live in the Newness of Small Differences (2018) won the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize. Other honours include a Malcolm Bradbury Grant for Poetry, a Toto Funds the Arts award, a Sangam House fellowship and a Speculative Literature Foundation grant. She is currently the poetry editor at Words Without Borders.