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Alicia Borinsky, Natasha Hakimi, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Christopher Santiago, Justin Boening

Alicia Borinsky is a widely published fiction writer, poet and novelist who writes both in Spanish and English.Her most recent books are, Frivolous Women and Other Sinners (poetry), published bilingually (Chicago: Swan Isle Press, 2011) ,One Way Tickets: Writers and the Culture of Exile, literary criticism, written in English, (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2012) and the bilingual poetry volume Las ciudades perdidas van al paraíso/Lost Cities go to Paradise (Chicago: Swan Isle Press, 2015). She is the recipient of several awards, including the Latino Literature Prize for Fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Alicia Borinsky is professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature at Boston University and Director of the Boston University Cultural Studies in Buenos Aires Program.

Natasha Hakimi Zapata holds a Creative Writing M.F.A. from Boston University and both a B.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of California, Los Angeles. In college she received scholarships from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the Smithsonian Latino Center and the UCLA Alumni Association. She has also received several awards for creative writing, including the May Merill Miller Award for Poetry in 2008 and 2010, the Ruth Brill Award for short fiction in 2010 and the Falling Leaves Award in 2010. Most recently she was awarded the 2012 Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and was a semifinalist for the Dzanc Books/ Guernica International Literary Award. She was awarded L.A. Press Club Awards in 2016 for her book review of the poetry collection I Am the Beggar of the World and in 2017 for her piece "Free to Be a Fool’: Behind the Scenes at the British Parliament’s Debate on Banning Trump." Natasha's passion for revealing the truth through writing has also led her to journalism. She has been published in Los Angeles magazine, where she interned, and continues to blog for it about Los Angeles events. In addition, she has worked for the renowned literary journal AGNI and has launched Truthdig's Poetry section as Truthdig's assistant and poetry editor. In 2016, Literal Publishing released bilingual editions of her translations of Alicia Borinsky's My Husband's Woman and Liliana Lukin's Theater of Operations. She hopes to continue writing for all three genres, balancing her passions for fiction and nonfiction, while often combining them in her creative work.

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow. Her most recent collection of poems, turn around, BRXGHT XYXS, was selected as Agape Editions' EDITORS' CHOICE, and will be published in 2019. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog and is an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Arts & Letters, among others; recently, her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. She teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension's Writers' Program.

Chris Santiago is the author of Tula, selected by A. Van Jordan as the winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, and published by Milkweed Editions. A 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow, his poems, fiction, and criticism have appeared in FIELDCopper NickelPleiades, and the Asian American Literary Review. He has also received fellowships from Kundiman and the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, and was a finalist for the 2017 Minnesota Book Award. He studied creative writing and music at Oberlin College and received his PhD in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Southern California, and teaches creative writing and Asian diasporic literature at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Justin Boening is the author of Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series, as well as Self-Portrait as Missing Person, which was awarded a Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship. He is a recipient of the "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University, and a Henry David Thoreau Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Denver QuarterlyKenyon Review OnlineLos Angeles Review of Books QuarterlyNarrative, and TYPO, among others. A graduate of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Boening is currently a senior editor at Poetry Northwest, and is cofounding editor at Horsethief Books.