Bryar Bajalan is a writer, translator and filmmaker presently pursuing a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. His work as a translator from the Arabic and Kurdish has appeared in Ambit, Modern Poetry in Translation and on the Poetry Foundation website, and his present projects include the translation of poets displaced from Shingal during the Islamic State's genocide of the Êzîdî and the collection of oral histories in Mosul.

Poet, translator, and filmmaker Shook was raised in Mexico City. They earned a BA at the University of Oklahoma and an MSt at Oxford University. In their debut collection, Our Obsidian Tongues (Eyewear Publishing, 2013), Shook explores the violence and hunger of everyday life, steeping their poems in lush imagery and sensory detail. In 2013, they founded the nonprofit publishing house Phoneme Media, since editing over 30 books translated from 26 languages, including the first ever literary translations from Uyghur and Lingala. Shook has also translated over 15 books from Spanish and Isthmus Zapotec, including Mario Bellatin's The Large Glass: Three Autobiographies (Eyewear Publishing, 2014), Víctor Terán's The Spines of Love (Restless Books, 2014), and Jorge Eduardo Eielson's Room in Rome (Cardboard House Press, 2019), a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.