Something Evergreen Called Life: Selected Poems

Rania Mamoun is a Sudanese writer and activist. She has published two novels in Arabic. Her short story collection, translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette as Thirteen Months of Sunrise and published by Comma Press, was shortlisted for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Mamoun’s writing has appeared in English translation in Mizna, for which she received a Pushcart Prize nomination, Shenandoah, Banipal, Words Without Borders, and the Fourth River. Her stories have appeared in translation in The Book of Khartoum and Banthology, both with Comma Press, and in Nouvelles du Soudan with Éditions Magellan & Cie. She has worked as an editor and contributor to arts magazines, and was a presenter for the cultural program Silicon Valley on Sudanese television.

Diane Samuels is a visual artist, with studio and public art practices.  In both she uses other peoples’ words as her literal and figurative raw material.   She has made drawings by writing out the texts of entire novels in micro-handwriting, converted a two-story glass pedestrian bridge into an anthology of phrases about looking at the world closely.

Since 2010, Samuels has made drawings that are hand-transcriptions of entire books.  She chooses books based on the core mission of City of Asylum an organization she co-founded with her husband Henry Reese. City of Asylum provides sanctuary to writers in exile who are persecuted for their literary writing.  The books Samuels chooses to transcribe deal with the themes of exile, social justice, and encountering “the other.”

Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian writer and translator. Her essays on literature, art and film have been published in Harper’s, Paris Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. Her poetry, visual art and translations from Arabic and French have appeared widely..

Feminist political scientist. Associate editor of Sampsonia Way Magazine. She has published in English and Turkish on Turkish politics, feminist politics, and political thought. In the English-speaking and reading world, she is the co-editor of Universities in the Neoliberal Era: Academic Cultures and Critical Perspectives (UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) (with Hakan Ergül), and Silent Violence: Neoliberalism, Islamist Politics and the AKP Years in Turkey (Canada: Red Quill Books, 2012) (with Gamze Yücesan-Özdemir). She translated major texts in social sciences from English to Turkish, and from Turkish to English. Her most recent translation is Handan Çağlayan’s seminal work on Kurdish women’s movement (Women in the Kurdish Movement: Mothers, Comrades, Goddess, Palgrave, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has been conducting research on feminist encounters in the neoliberal academia. She was a visiting professor at the Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, teaching two graduate courses, in Fall 2017. Between 2018 – 2020 she researched and taught undergraduate courses as a visiting scholar at Cornell Institute for European Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. Between 2020 January and 2021 June she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh as a resident in the City of Asylum. Coşar has been involved in feminist movement in Turkey.