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Alton Melvar M. Dapanas (they/them)—essayist, poet, and translator from the southern Philippines—has authored three books of lyric essays and prose poems including M of the Southern Downpours (Downingfield, 2024). Their writings and translations have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Michigan Quarterly Review, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (2023) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (2024). Formerly with the Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays.