CONTRIBUTORS

Jessica Abughattas is the author of Strip, which won the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara. She lives in Los Angeles, where she’s at work on a second poetry collection.

Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was a Lebanese American poet, writer, and painter.

Elina Alter is the translator of Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love (Deep Vellum), and Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound (Catapult). She’s an Oral History Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, and the editor of Circumference, a journal of translation and international culture.

Claressinka Anderson’s poetry and prose have appeared in numerous publications, most recently the 2022 Best New Poets anthology. Through her ongoing collaborations with artists, her work engages the interstitial spaces of contemporary art, literature, and music.

Tina Chang is the author of the poetry collections Hybrida (W. W. Norton, 2019), Of Gods &Strangers (Four Way Books, 2011), and Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004). She is also the co-editor of the W. W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: ContemporaryPoetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2008). She served as Brooklyn Poet Laureate (2010–2022) and is currently a professor and the director of creative writing at her alma mater, Binghamton University.

Born in Hartsville, South Carolina, Curtis Cuffie (1955–2002), transformed discarded objects into collaged figures that speak to both the abject reality of urban surplus and the alchemy of artistic creation. Built outdoors, primarily on the sidewalks of downtown Manhattan in the 1990s and early 2000s, his sculptures were subject to the whims of weather, police interference, and the sanitation department; documented by photographers, and eventually presented in more traditional commercial and institutional venues. Solo exhibitions include Recent Sculpture curated by Darrell Maupin and Kenny Schachter at Flamingo East (1992), Meet me at the Margin curated by Carol Thompson at A Gathering of the Tribes (1996). Group exhibitions include Assemblage: Reordering Chaos curated by Aarne Anton at American Primitive Gallery (1996), Treasures of the Soul: Who Is Rich? curated by Marcus Schubert at the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore (2000), Souls Grown Diaspora curated by Sam Gordon at Apex Art (2020), and Greater New York curated by Ruba Katrib at MoMA PS1 (2021).

Mike Davis (1946–2022) was an American writer, communist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in Los Angeles and beyond, with works such as City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998), and, most recently, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (2020), co-authored by Jon Wiener.

Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is the current poet laureate of San Francisco, California.

Shangyang Fang is the author of Burying the Mountain (2021).

Alla Gorbunova is the author of Another Matter and It’s the End of the World, My Love, as well as two other books of prose and seven collections of poetry.

Hervé Guibert was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France toward AIDS Hervé Guibert, who wrote in the wake of Jean Genet, Hermann Ungar, and Thomas Bernhard, has also produced an important body of photographs, in the manner of a diary. Just as in his writings, he practices autofiction in his photographs, and his images are nourished by daily life and his intimacy.

Jane Huffman’s debut collection, Public Abstract, was the winner of the 2023 APR / Honickman First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The NewYorker, and elsewhere. Jane is a doctoral student at the University of Denver and is editor-inchief of Guesthouse.

Mike Jeffrey is a writer from Rhode Island. His work has appeared in The Idaho Review, Soft Punk Magazine, Boston Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

Sharon Kivland is an artist, writer, editor, and publisher. She has just finished writing Almanach, the companion book to Abécédaire (Moist Books, 2022), and she is currently editing it ruthlessly.

Max Lawton is a writer and musician, and translates Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish literature. He is the translator of 10 books by Vladimir Sorokin and two books by Jonathan Littell.

Jaime Lowe is the author of Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires (2021), Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind (2017), and Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB (2008). She is also a contributor to The New York Times Magazine.

Katie Peterson’s next collection of poems, Fog and Smoke, is forthcoming from FSG in 2024.

Megan Pinto’s first poetry collection is forthcoming from Four Way Books in fall 2024. Recent work can be found in Guernica, The Massachusetts Review, 128 Lit, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn. Find her online at www.meganpinto.com.

Laila Riazi is a writer and doctoral student living in California.

Bud Smith writes stories and works heavy construction in New Jersey. His novel Teenager was published by Vintage in 2022.

Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue, was published France in 1985. In 1992, Sorokin’s Their Four Hearts was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. In 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between Stalin and

Khrushchev clones, led to public demonstrations against the book and demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer. He has written numerous plays and short stories, including two volumes of stories forthcoming from NYRB Classics and one forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. He lives in Berlin.

Bharat Jayram Venkat is an assistant professor at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics with joint appointments in the departments of history and anthropology. He is also the director of the UCLA Heat Lab, an interdisciplinary research team that studies thermal inequality. Venkat is the author of At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021)

Jon Wiener is a professor of history emeritus at UC Irvine. His most recent books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored with Mike Davis, and Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower. He is a contributing editor to and member of the board of directors of Los Angeles Review of Books, a contributing editor to The Nation, and host of The Nation’s weekly podcast, Start Making Sense.