Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of two books of poetry, The Ground (2012) and Heaven (2015), both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as a collection of literary essays, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, and a translation (from the Catalan) of Salvador Espriu’s Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and the GLCA New Writers Award. He was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and the NAACP Image Award for Poetry, and was a long-listed finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and the National Book Award. Heaven has been named one of the best books/poetry collections of the year by The Washington Post and NPR, among others. His poetry has been translated into Catalan, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Spanish. Phillips has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Stony Brook University. He is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and lives in New York City and Barcelona. Author photo: Sue Kwon
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Melcion Mateu (Barcelona, Spain, 1971) is the author of four books of poetry, among them Vida evident, which won the 1998 Octavio Paz Prize, and Illes lligades, which was awarded the 2014 Jocs Florals de Barcelona Prize. Several of the poems from Illes Illigades are featured, along with those of Rowan Ricardo Phillips, in bassist and composer Alexis Cuadrado's forthcoming CD, Poètica. Mateu has translated into Catalan works by John Ashbery, Siri Hustvedt, and Michael Ondaatje, among others. He holds an MA in comparative literature from Cornell University and a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from New York University. He is currently a professor at the Univesidade Federal do Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil.
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