THREE POETS TURN THE TIDE ON GEOGRAPHY & IDENTITY

JAMES ALLEN HALL is the author of a previous book of poems, Now You’re the Enemy, and I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, a book of lyric essays. They direct the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College and co-host, with poet Aaron Smith, Breaking Form: A Podcast of Poetry and Culture.

RACHEL DEWOSKIN is the author of five novels – Banshee, Someday We Will Fly, Blind, Big Girl Small, and Repeat After Me – the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing; and the poetry collections Two Menus and absolute animal. Her essays, poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times Magazine of London, Condé Nast Traveler, Asian Wall Street Journal, and numerous journals and anthologies. She is on the core creative writing faculty at the University of Chicago and affiliated faculty in Jewish and East Asian Studies. DeWoskin also serves on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action (WDA).

RAJIV MOHABIR is a poet, memoirist, translator, and the author of four books of poetry, including Cutlish, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction works have been named finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in poetry and nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir, respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Whale Aria: Poems (Four Way Books) is Mohabir’s fourth collection. He is currently an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado, Boulder.