Danielle Legros Georges is a poet, essayist, translator, and professor in the Creative Arts in Learning Division of Lesley University. She curates Boston-based and international poetry events, and is the author of two books of poems, Maroon and The Dear Remote Nearness of You, and editor of City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems. In 2014 she was appointed Boston’s Poet Laureate. Danielle is a contributor to Jalada 05/Transition 123.
David Chariandy is a fiction writer and critic who teaches in the department of English at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada. His first novel,Soucouyant, was published internationally and nominated for eleven literary prizes and awards, including the Governor General’s Award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book of Canada and the Caribbean, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe. His second novel Brother will be published in Canada by Penguin Random House in fall 2017, and in the U.S. and U.K. by Bloomsbury in spring 2018. Chariandy’s criticism has been published in Callaloo, Topia, The Journal of West Indian Literatures, The Global South, and Postcolonial Text, as well as in The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature and The Routledge Guide to Anglophone Caribbean Literature. His fiction with an accompanying interview is featured in Callaloo 30.3 (2007) and Transition 113 (2014). David co-edited the “Writing Black Canadas”materials in Transition 124 with Phanuel Antwi.
Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born poet, educator, publisher and social advocate. He is the author of two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation (2017) and Higher Ground (2006), which was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award and co-author of The Next Verse Poets Mixtape -Volume One: the 4 X 4 (2016). His poetry has been featured in Interviewing the Caribbean, Pangyrus, jubilat, Soundings East, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Naugatuck River Review, sx salon, and Tidal Basin Review, among others. He was recognized as the 2015 PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry and his manuscript, When My Body Was a Clinched Fist, was selected as a semi-finalist for the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Book Prize. Surin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently Associate Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College and founding editor and publisher at Central Square Press. Enzo is a contributor to Jalada 05/Transition 123.
Moses Kilolo is the Managing Editor of Jalada, a Pan-African writers’ Collective that has become an important literary space for African writers and artists from the continent and beyond. Moses conceptualized and provided the editorial coordination for the Inaugural Jalada Translations Issue, which features the single most translated short story in the history of African writing. Alongside co-curators, he conceptualised the Inaugural Jalada Festival, and headed the team in executing Africa’s first Mobile Literary and Arts Festival that made stops in 12 towns across 5 countries in 28 days. Moses has participated in festivals around the world to speak about his passion on the practical work of promoting African Language Literatures. He has written for the English PEN, Saraba Magazine, and many others. Moses is a fitness enthusiast, but also loves his drink and good conversation. You can engage with Moses via twitter and Facebook, and follow Jalada Africa via @jaladaafrica.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is a writer from Zimbabwe, and has lived in South Africa and the USA. She earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a recipient of the Maytag and Teaching-Writing Fellowships, as well as a Rydson Award for Excellence in Fiction. She was recently awarded a prestigious Bellagio Arts and Literary Arts Residency Award by the Rockefeller Foundation to work on edits for her novel ‘The House of Stone’, which is forthcoming in 2018 with W.W. Norton in the USA and Atlantic Books in the UK. Her debut collection, Shadows, was published in 2013 by the South African publisher Kwela and awarded the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. Novuyo is a founding member and former Deputy Editor of the Pan-African Collective, Jalada, where she helped build the structures through which the platform has thrived, and led Jalada’s editorial team on its first print anthology, the highly lauded Jalada 05/Transition 123 Fear Issue, in collaboration with the Harvard based Transition Magazine. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board and is a Fiction Editor at The Bare Life Review, a journal of immigrant and refugee literature based in New York, and is currently a PhD student at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
Phanuel Antwi is a son, a lucky brother of two handsome, loving sisters, Agnes and Clara, a blessed uncle to a beautiful boy, Ezekiel, and niece, Chelsea. In addition, he works with dance, is a poet, activist, aesthete, as well as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at University of British Columbia. He has been politically active in organizing around a range of issues, including anti-immigration laws and practices, anti-racism and anti-capitalism, sex workers’ rights, labour rights within the university sphere, and leadership opportunities for marginalized youth. He spends loads of time exploring questions of desire, the poetics of identity, and the intimacies of everyday living. Phanuel co-edited the “Writing Black Canadas” materials in Transition 124 with David Chariandy.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika was raised in Nigeria and has lived in Kenya, France, and England. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Sarah currently serves on the boards of Hedgebrook and the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. She is a Patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature and host to OZY’s video series Write. Her second novel, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, was shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize. Sarah is a contributor to Transition 124.
