Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet and translator and the author of Innocence (CSU Poetry Center, 2022), which was selected for the Lighthouse Poetry Series by Shane McCrae. He is co-editor of APARTMENT Poetry, and his work has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, DIAGRAM, Guernica, FOLDER, Fence, Sink Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. He lives in Denver.
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her latest publications include prepoems in postspanish & other poems by Jorgenrique Adoum (Action Books, 2021) and from a red barn by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (co•im•press, 2020). Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Managing Editor for Action Books and the Poetry in Translation Editor at the Kenyon Review. She resides in Ohio, where she is a Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. More info: www.katherinemhedeen.com
Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (2020, Eulalia Books), which was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (2018, Kenning Editions). She curates Poesía en acción on the Action Books blog and her writing on translation has appeared in Kenyon Review, Latin American Literature Today, Reading in Translation, and Words Without Borders. She is a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Fellow in Spanish at Kenyon College and a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Raúl Gómez Jattin (Cartagena, 1945–1997) was one of Colombia’s most outstanding poets—and one of the country’s most controversial literary figures. He spent most of his adult life between psychiatric hospitals, jails, and living as a homeless person. Through it all, he never stopped writing poetry or reciting it on street corners; his instantly-famous public readings drew hundreds of listeners. As a queer man of Syrian descent writing in a way that broke with his country’s tradition, his rightful place at the forefront of Colombian poetry has long been denied. In 1997, he was tragically killed by a bus.
Almost Obscene is Gómez Jattin’s English-language debut. It includes work culled from his sporadic chapbooks, written from 1980-1997, showcasing a jaggedness of tone, approach, and mind space—precisely the unpredictability that made Gómez Jattin an uncomfortable presence within mainstream Colombian literary circles. Ranging widely in content and form, what unites these poems is the uninhibited expression of a marginalized poetic voice; a decolonizing queerness that challenges the heteronormative as it defies the West’s narrow definitions of queer poetics.
