Rachel Ellis Neyra is poet-theorist. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University. Her areas of research are Latina/o, Caribbean, and African Diasporic literature, cinema, and music, 20th century poetry, and critical and literary theory. She’s recently published an essay on the Cry in Latina/o and Black Diasporic Poetics in Comparative Literature and Culture Web and a review essay on Nathalie Stephens’ translation of Édouard Glissant’s book, Poetic Intention,in Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora. A new poem about the Cuban pianist, Bebo Valdés, called “Bebo in Agnefit” is forthcoming in Sargasso in English and Spanish translation wrought in collaboration with the Cuban writer and scholar, Susana Haug. She’s at work on a book about Latina/o Poetry and Cinema that focuses on the figures of the Cry and the Illegal, among others, and on a series of poems about the killing of Marcelo Lucero in Patchogue, Long Island in 2008.
Joan Larkin’s new poetry collection, Blue Hanuman, is forthcoming this Spring from Hanging Loose. Her previous work includes My Body: New and Selected Poems, recipient of the Audre Lorde Award; Legs Tipped with Small Claws, an Argos chapbook; Sor Juana’s Love Poems, translated with Jaime Manrique; A Long Sound; and Housework. Cold River, recipient of the Lambda Award for poetry, was the basis for her play The AIDS Passion, produced at the Huntingdon Theater in Boston. Her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer in Residence at Smith College.
Sahar Muradi is an Afghan-born, Florida-grown, and NY-based writer and performer. She is co-editor, with Zohra Saed, of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature. Her writing has appeared in Drunken Boat, dOCUMENTA, phati’tude, and Green Mountains Review. She is the recipient of an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Open City Fellowship and a Himan Brown Creative Writing Award. Sahar has an MPA in international development from New York University, a BA in creative writing from Hampshire College, and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Brooklyn College.
