Mona Kareem

Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. Her poetry has been translated into nine languages, and appeared (in English) in: POETRY, Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, among others. She is a recipient of a 2021 literary grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Kareem holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and works as an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at Washington University St. Louis. Her translations into Arabic include Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within (nominated for a BTBA award), Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s Except for this Unseen Thread, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. She tweets @monakareem.

Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University, and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Elkamel’s poems have appeared inPOETRY, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Yale Review, and Gulf Coast, among others, and in the anthologies Best New Poets ‘20 & ‘22 and Best of the Net ‘20. She was named the winner of Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest and the Tinderbox‘s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. Elkamel’s debut chapbook Field of No Justice was published by the African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books in 2021. She tweets @SaraFarag.