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Pía Barros
Pía Barros currently lives and works as a publisher and prolific prose writer in Chile. Her work is among the most celebrated in the country’s contemporary literary scene. She belongs to a generation of writers who established their careers during the latter part of the violent Pinochet dictatorship, and like many of those writers, her fiction reflects concern for the social injustices of that time period and the struggles of the country to move past them.
Photo by Merleyn Belldiv>Reid Bartholomew
Reid Bartholomew is an assistant language teacher on the JET Programme teaching English in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma, he studies contemporary Japanese literature.
Photo by Medija Centar Beograddiv>Svetislav Basara
Svetislav Basara (b. 1953) is a contemporary Serbian author of more than twenty literary works. He writes novels, story collections, and essays, and is the recipient of several Serbian literary awards.
Photo by Susan Seubertdiv>Samiya Bashir
Samiya Bashir’s work has recently appeared in Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cura, The Rumpus, Callaloo, and Encyclopedia F–K (vol. 2). Her most recent book of poems, Gospel, was a finalist for both the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and, along with her first collection, Where the Apple Falls, the Lambda Literary Award.
Photo by Antonio Reyesdiv>Aicha Bassry
Aicha Bassry was born in Ben Ahmad, Morocco in 1969. Her publications include massā’āt (2000; Evenings); araqu al-malā’ikah (2003; Angels’ insomnia); laylah sari`atu al `atab (2007; A fragile night); and khulwatu al tayr (2010; The bird’s seclusion), from which the present extracts are taken. Her poems have also been translated into Spanish, French, Turkish, and Italian.
Lopamudra Basu
Lopamudra Basu is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Stout. She is author of Ayad Akhtar, the American Nation and Its Others after 9/11: Homeland Insecurity (2018). She has reviewed books for World Literature Today, India Currents, and Ariel: A Review of International English Literature.
Devika Basu
Devika Basu is a high school English teacher, bilingual poet, translator, and a lover of Spanish literature. She loves to explore the hidden treasures of different literary genres, with a special focus on poetry. Her published works include three books of poems. Her pen scribbles the diverse aspects of life; Devika has traveled extensively and she would like to walk across the inroads of life with poetry.
Photo: Ekko Von Schwichowdiv>Andreas Baum
Andreas Baum (b. 1967) grew up in Nairobi and Hesse, Germany. He studied journalism and Latin American studies in Berlin and has written as a journalist for well-known German newspapers. Since 2013 he is the culture editor and an author at Deutschlandradio Kultur. Wir waren die neue Zeit (We were the new era) is his first novel.
Judith Baumel
Judith Baumel is a poet, critic, and translator from Italian and Ukrainian. She is a professor of English and founding director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She has served as president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, director of the Poetry Society of America, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Italy. Her books include The Weight of Numbers, for which she won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Now, The Kangaroo Girl, and the forthcoming Passeggiate.
Ruperta Bautista Vázquez
Ruperta Bautista Vázquez is a community educator, writer, anthropologist, translator, and Tsotsil Maya actress from San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. She has published a number of books, and her work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Catalan, and Portuguese.
Rand Bawwab
Rand Bawwab is a Palestinian poet, future doctor, and part-time swim coach from Lod, Palestine. She has been writing poetry from a young age and turns to it as a safe haven. She firmly believes that writing has the power to ignite awareness and change where injustice exists.
Jason Bayani
Jason Bayani is the author of Amulet (Write Bloody Publishing, 2013). He’s an MFA graduate from Saint Mary’s College, a Kundiman Fellow, and works as the artistic director for Kearny Street Workshop. Jason performs regularly around the country and recently debuted his solo theater show, Locus of Control, in 2016.
Faraj Bayrakdar
Faraj Bayrakdar (b. 1951) of Syria is a journalist and award-winning poet. In 1987 he was arrested on suspicion of belonging to the Party for Communist Action. He was held incommunicado for nearly seven years and tortured. In 1993 the supreme court sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. Fourteen months shy of completing his sentence, Bayrakdar was granted amnesty. He now lives in Sweden. He has won many awards, including the 1998 Hellman-Hammett Award, the 1999 International PEN Award from PEN American Center West, and the 2004 Free Word Award from NOVIB in the Netherlands.
Askold Bazhanov
Askold Bazhanov is a Skolt Saami poet writing in the Russian language. He was born in 1934 in the village of Notozero, Murmansk district, Russia. After the Second World War he relocated to Leningrad to study in the Department of the Peoples of the North, a special sector for ethnic minorities created under the auspices of Gertsen State Pedagogical University. Upon returning home to the historically Saami lands near Lovozero township, he began writing poetry while working in various occupations: as a miner, a railroad technician, a tractor operator, and a reindeer herder. His best-known publications include Solntse nad tundroi (Sun over the tundra, 1983) and Belyi Olen’ (The white reindeer, 1996). The main themes of his poetry include the struggle to preserve indigenous cultural identity in the face of encroaching modernity; surviving the hardships of collectivization, war, and economic exploitation; and the intimate, spiritual connections between humans and the natural world. His work has been translated into English and various dialects of Saami.
Jan Beatty
Jan Beatty’s fifth book, Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), won the 2018 Paterson Prize. The Huffington Post called her one of ten “advanced women poets for required reading.” She worked as an abortion counselor, in maximum-security prisons, and directs the creative writing program at Carlow University.
Beau Beausoleil
Beau Beausoleil is a poet and activist (Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here) based in San Francisco, California. His most recent book of poetry is Another Way Home (Blue Light Press, 2022).
Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel (/ˈbɛkdəl/ bek-dəl; born September 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist. Originally best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home.
Zeina Hashem Beck
Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck is the author of two chapbooks: 3arabi Song, winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and There Was and How Much There Was, a 2016 Laureate’s Choice, selected by Carol Ann Duffy. Her latest book, Louder Than Hearts, winner of the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, is forthcoming in April 2017.
Hakim Bellamy
Hakim Bellamy became the inaugural poet laureate of Albuquerque on April 14, 2012, at age thirty-three. He was the son of a preacher man (and a praying woman). Bellamy has been on two national champion poetry slam teams, won collegiate and city poetry slam championships (in Albuquerque and Silver City, NM), and has been published in numerous anthologies and on inner-city buses. A musician, actor, journalist, playwright, and community organizer, Bellamy’s first book, Swear, was recently published by West End Press.
Aitana Bellido
Aitana Bellido is an independent researcher and cultural manager based in Barcelona. Her background in translation, law, and publishing has led her to pursue research on world literature and the material and colonial dimensions of literary circulation. She has worked at the project “The Novel as Global Form: Poetic Challenges and Cross-Border Literary Circulation” (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya).