The ghazal is a form of amatory poem or ode, originating in Arabic poetry. Ghazals often deal with topics of spiritual and romantic love and may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation from the beloved and the beauty of love in spite of that pain.
Sohrab Sepehri was a notable Iranian poet and painter. He is considered to be one of the five most famous Iranian poets who have practiced modern poetry alongside Nima Youshij, Ahmad Shamlou, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, and Forough Farrokhzad. Sepehri's poems have been translated into several languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Lithuanian and Kurdish.
Agha Shahid Ali Qizilbash was an Indian-American poet who immigrated to the United States and became affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry. His collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas,A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, and Rooms Are Never Finished, the latter a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001.
Louis Aston Marantz Simpson was an American poet born in Jamaica. He won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work At the End of the Open Road.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land.
Khosrow Shakibai was an Iranian actor. He has received various accolades, including three Crystal Simorgh, a Hafez Award, two Iran Cinema Celebration Awards and an Iran's Film Critics and Writers Association Award.
Ilya Kaminsky is a USSR-born, Ukrainian-Jewish-American poet, critic, translator and professor. He is best known for his poetry collections Dancing in Odesa and Deaf Republic, which have earned him several awards.
Ghassan Hamdan is an Iraqi scholar, poet and translator.
Annie Finch is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer and the editor of the first major anthology of literature about abortion. Her poetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm, meter, and poetic form and for its themes of feminism, witchcraft, goddesses, and earth-based spirituality. Her books include The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, A Poet's Craft, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses.
Ellen Doré Watson is an American poet, translator and teacher.
Dan Beachy-Quick is an American poet, writer, and critic. He is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently, Variations on Dawn and Dusk, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books include A Whaler’s Dictionary, a collection of essays about Moby Dick. His honors include a Lannan Foundation Residency and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
BOA Editions, Ltd. is an American independent, non-profit literary publishing company located in Rochester, New York, founded in 1976 by the late poet, editor and translator, A. Poulin, Jr., and publishing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
The Best Translated Book Award is an American literary award that recognizes the previous year's best original translation into English, one book of poetry and one of fiction. It was inaugurated in 2008 and is conferred by Three Percent, the online literary magazine of Open Letter Books, which is the book translation press of the University of Rochester. A long list and short list are announced leading up to the award.
Mark Irwin is an American poet. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Joyful Orphan. His honors and awards include the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, The Nation/Discovery Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, Colorado and Ohio Art Council Fellowships, two Colorado Book Awards, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations.
Nightboat Books is an American nonprofit literary press founded in 2004 and located in Brooklyn, New York. The press publishes poetry, fiction, essays, translations, and intergenre books.
Sepehri’s most important book entitled Hasht Ketab is a compilation of his prior eight books of poetry. In this compilation, published in 1976, Sepehri laments the loss of traditional Persian beliefs regarding courtesy and deeper connection between people. Furthermore, there are streaks of naturalism and nature description in Sepehri’s poetry and this is notable in most poems of his books.
Ahmad Beiranvand is an Iranian poet and writer. His activities revolve around poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, which his books and essays are about.
She'r-e Nimaa'i is a school of Modernist poetry in Iran that is derived from the literary theory of Nima Yooshij, a contemporary Iranian poet. Nima Yooshij revolutionized the stagnant atmosphere of Iranian poetry with the influential poem Afsaneh, which was the manifesto of She'r-e Nimaa'i. He consciously challenged all the foundations and structures of ancient Persian poetry. The nature of Mazandaran, social criticism, and humor are just a few examples of the themes that Nima Yooshij used in his poems. She'r-e Nimaa'i was the source of inspiration and growth of many great modern Iranian poets, including Sohrab Sepehri, Forough Farrokhzad, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales and Fereydoun Moshiri.
David Pollock Young is an American poet, translator, editor, literary critic and professor. His work includes 11 volumes of poetry, translations from Italian, Chinese, German, Czech, Dutch, and Spanish, critical work on Shakespeare, Yeats, and modernist poets, and landmark anthologies of prose poetry and magical realism. He co-founded and edited the magazine FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics for its 50 years of publication. Young is also Longman Professor Emeritus of English at Oberlin College, and is the recipient of awards including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.
