Jane Assimakopoulos is an American-born translator from Greek and French. Her translations include work by award-winning author Thanassis Valtinos (Northwestern University Press and Yale University Press). She has edited the Greek translations of over 20 novels by the late acclaimed American author Philip Roth. She lives in Greece.
Ali Bolcakan is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
Iana Boukova is a Bulgarian born and bilingual (Bulgarian-Greek) poet, writer and translator. She has published in Bulgarian two books of poetry, a collection of short stories and a novel, as well as the translations of more than 15 books of modern Greek and ancient poetry (Sappho, Catullus, Pindar). She has lived in Greece since 1994 where she is a member of the platform Greek Poetry Now and of the editors board of FRMK, a biannual journal on poetry, poetics and visual arts. In 2006 the Athens publishing house Ikaros published her book of poetry The Minimal Garden. Poems and short stories by Iana Boukova have been translated in English, Spanish, French and several other languages.
Vinicio Capossela was born in 1965 in Hannover, Germany and grew up in Campania, Italy. He is a singer-songwriter with over fifteen albums to his credit, and the author of three books, Non si muore tutte le matine (2004), In clandestinità (co-written with Vincenzo Costantino Cinaski, 2009), and Tefteri - Il libro dei conti in sospeso (2013).
Yiorgos Chouliaras is a Greek poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator, who was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. He studied in New York and now lives in Athens, after having worked in Ottawa, Washington, DC, and Dublin. He is the author of multiple collections of poetry, including Iconoclasm (1972), The Other Tongue (1981), The Treasure of the Balkans (1988), and Dictionary of Memories (2013).
Cameron Cross is Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he teaches Persian literature (classical and modern), Iranian cinema, and various topics in Middle Eastern studies.
Born in 1977, Tarek Emam is a young Egyptian writer and journalist who studied English Literature at Alexandria University. He has published three collections of short stories, a children’s book, and five novels. The Second Life of Constantine Cavafy, which came out in 2012, tells an imaginary tale about the poet as he reads, in secret, a novel being written about him by one Alexander Singopoulos, with whom Cavafy shared an intimate friendship.
Karen Emmerich is a translator of Modern Greek prose and poetry. She has translated a collection of short stories by Ersi Sotiropoulos as well as works by Margarita Karapanou, Amanda Michalopoulou and Sophia Nikolaidou. She teaches comparative literature at Princeton.
Maryam Hooleh was born in Tehran, Iran in 1978 and now lives in Sweden. She is the author of several books of poetry, including The Kite Will Never Fly in My Hands (1998), In the Alleys of Athens (1999), Cursed Booth (2000), and Contemporaneous Leprosy and Hell INC (both 2004).
Thomas Ioannou was born in Arta, Greece in 1979. A graduate in Medicine at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, he works as a neurologist, poet, and essayist. His work has been included in literary magazines, and his first book, Ippokratous 15, was published in 2011. He also serves on the editorial team for the Greek literary magazine Ta Poiitika.
Mata Kastrisiou was born in Athens, Greece in 1989. She is a graduate of the Theater of Arts - Karolos Koun Drama School and of the Department of Archaeology and History of Art of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the author of The Six O’Clock Garbage Truck.
A teacher and editor, David Mason was born and raised in Bellingham, Washington. Mason’s collections of poetry include The Buried Houses (1991), winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize; The Country I Remember (1996), winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; Arrivals (2004); and the verse novel Ludlow (2007), awarded the Colorado Book Award for Poetry and named best book of poetry in 2007 by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. His prose includes a memoir about Greece, News from the Village: Aegean Friends (2010), and a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry (1999). Mason teaches at Colorado College. He was appointed the Colorado poet laureate in 2010.
Elettra Pauletto is a writer and translator. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she also studied literary translation. Her writings and translations have appeared in Pacific Standard Magazine, Guernica Magazine, The Iowa City Press-Citizen, and elsewhere. She is currently translating a book on the music of Michael Jackson.
Born in 1979 in Patras, Greece, Elena Polygeni is a poet, actress, and musician, and has published three books of poetry, The Land of Paradoxical Things (To Kendri, 2014), My Sorrow is a Woman (Poema, 2012), and Letters on a Blackboard (Dodoni, 2009).
Angela Rodel is a professional literary translator living and working in Bulgaria. She received a 2014 NEA translation grant for Georgi Gospodinov’s novel The Physics of Sorrow (Open Letter 2015)—the first time a Bulgarian-language work has received such an award. Six novels in her translation have been published by US and UK publishers. Her translations have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including McSweeney’s, Little Star, Granta.org, Two Lines, The White Review and Words Without Borders.
William Gertz Runyan is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His research examines the dynamic geocultural boundaries of Yiddish literary discourse in the twentieth century.
A Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan, Anton Shammas is a Palestinian writer and translator of Arabic, Hebrew and English. He is the author of three books of poetry, two plays, many essays in English, Hebrew and Arabic, and a novel (Arabesques), originally published in Hebrew and translated into nine languages.
Chaim Shoshkes was an author, economist, and journalist, born in Bialystok, Poland in 1891. He was well known for his travel writing, widely syndicated in the Yiddish world press.
Ersi Sotiropoulos has written ten works of fiction and a book of poetry. Her Zigzag through the Bitter Orange Trees was the first novel ever to win both the Greek national prize for literature and Greece’s preeminent book critics’ award. Sotiropoulos has been a fellow at institutes and universities around the world, including the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and Princeton University. She lives in Athens. Her novel What’s Left of the Night, translated by Karen Emmerich, is now available from New Vessel Press.
Will Stroebel is a comparatist of Modern Greek and Turkish literature, focusing on book history and textual fluidity across the Greco-Turkish Mediterranean. He recently defended his dissertation at the University of Michigan and will be working as a postdoctorate fellow this year at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. His work has been published in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies and Book History.
Holly Taylor just defended her thesis and is currently about to graduate from Oregon State University with an M.F.A in fiction writing. Though she mostly writes about her childhood and country upbringing in rural Michigan, she has also written extensively about Greece (specifically, about her time traveling in northern Greece).
Christina Vallianatos is a proud alumna of the Modern Greek Program at the University of Michigan, receiving a BS in Neuroscience and Modern Greek Studies in 2010. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Human Genetics from the University of Michigan, where she studies how certain genes influence brain development and disorders such as autism.
Peter Vorissis is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He also has a Master’s degree in Literary Translation from NYU and his translations from the French have appeared in The Guardian and The Brooklyn Rail.