Farhad Pirbal (born 1961) is an iconic Kurdish writer, poet, painter, critic, singer, and scholar, who has lived in Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Germany, Denmark, and France, where he obtained his Ph.D. in History of Contemporary Kurdish Literature at the Sorbonne. Publishing since 1979, Pirbal has authored more than seventy books of writing and translation and serves as one of Kurdistan’s farthest-reaching voices. In 1994, he founded the Sharafkhan Bidlisi Cultural Center in Hawler. In 2024, marking his English-language debut, Deep Vellum will publish his collected poems, Refugee Number 33,333, and his debut short story collection, The Potato Eaters.
Pshtiwan Babakr is a filmmaker, curator, and translator who has served as the archivist for visual arts at Kashkul, the center for arts and culture at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, and has directed and produced several documentaries, including Red Land and Not for Sale. His translations can be found in World Literature Today, On the Seawall, Loch Raven Review, and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars.
Shook is a poet and translator. Since living in Slemani for two years, they have co-translated over a dozen Kurdish writers into English and Spanish. Today they direct Kashkul Books, a multilingual publishing project based in South Kurdistan. Their recent translations include a Spanish-language edition of Refugee Number 33,333 (Gato Negro Ediciones, co-translated by Jiyar Homer) and Conceição Lima's No Gods Live Here (Phoneme).
Zêdan Xelef was born on Shingal Mountain in northern Iraq, in 1995, and arrived with his family to the Chamishko IDP camp in late 2014. Today he is an MFA student at San Francisco State University, and contributes to ingal Lives, an oral history project where he manages a team of Yezidi young people dedicated to collecting and preserving their culture’s endangered oral tradition.
Bryar Bajalan is a writer, translator, and filmmaker currently pursuing a doctorate in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. With Shook, he has co-translated Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi’s A Friends Kitchen (Poetry Translation Centre, 2023) and Zêdan Xelef’s A Barcode Scanner (Kashkul Books, 2021/Gato Negro Ediciones, 2022).
Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a poet, translator, and assistant professor at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). Her debut collection Dream State appeared from Unnamed Press in 2024. She serves as the Founding Director of Kashkul and was the Founding Director of the Slemani UNESCO City of Literature. She is a 2022 NEA Fellow, the first ever working from the Kurdish.
Shook is a poet and translator who lives in Northern California. Their recent translations include Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi’s A Friend’s Kitchen, cotranslated from Arabic with Bryar Bajalan, Mikeas Sánchez’ How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, cotranslated from Zoque and Spanish with Wendy Call, and Conceição Lima’s No Gods Live Here, translated from Portuguese. Shook’s film A Barcode Scanner, based on Zêdan Xelef’s poem by the same name, won the 2020 Best Film for Tolerance Prize at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.