Estevão Azevedo

Estevão Azevedo was born in Natal (Rio Grande do Norte) and lives in São Paulo. An editor, he received a graduate degree in Brazilian literature from the University of São Paulo. In 2005, he published the short-story collection O som de nada acontecendo [The Sound of Nothing Happening] (Edições K). His first novel, Nunca o nome do menino [Never the Boy’s Name] (Terceiro Nome, 2008; Record, 2016), was a finalist for the São Paulo Award for Literature in 2009. He has published short stories in various literary magazines and in the anthology of Brazilian writers Popcorn unterm Zuckerhut—Junge brasilianische literature, published in Germany in 2013. Tempo de espalhar pedras [A Time to Cast Away Stones], published in 2014, won the São Paulo Award for Literature, became a finalist for the Oceanos Award, and was released in Italy in 2016 as Tempo di spargere pietre.

Paul Beatty

Paul Beatty is the author of four novels, Slumberland, Tuff, The White Boy Shuffle, and The Sellout, which won both the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the 2016 Man Booker Prize. It was named one of the best books of 2015 by the Times and the Wall Street Journal. He has also authored two books of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. He is the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor.

Eric M. B. Becker

Eric M. B. Becker is a writer, literary translator, and editor of Words without Borders. He is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. In 2014, he earned a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of a collection of short stories from the Portuguese by Neustadt Prize for International Literature winner and 2015 Man Booker International Finalist Mia Couto (due out in early 2019 from Biblioasis). He has also published translations of numerous writers from Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa, His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Literary Hub, Freeman’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other publications. He has served on the juries of the ALTA National Translation Award and the PEN Translation Prize.

Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky’s literary translations include eight works of fiction by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels and poetry by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Uljana Wolf, and others. A Guggenheim fellow and former chair of the PEN Translation Committee, she co-edited (with Esther Allen) the Columbia University Press anthology In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means. Her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Yoko Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She is currently completing work on a biography of Robert Walser for Yale University Press and blogs about translation at www.translationista.com.

Rivka Galchen

Rivka Galchen is an award winning fiction writer and journalist, whose work appears often in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The London Review of Books and The New York Times. She is the author of three books: Atmospheric Disturbances (Novel, FSG, 2008), American Innovations (Short Stories, FSG 2014) and Little Labors (Essays, New Directions, 2016). She has received numerous prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, The Berlin Prize and The William J Saroyan International Prize in Fiction. In 2010, she was named to The New Yorker’s list of 20 Writers Under 40. Galchen also holds an MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestselling essay collection, and a novel, The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and The New York Times, where she is a regular columnist for the Sunday Book Review. Leslie was recently awarded a Lenfest Junior Faculty Research Grant. She is currently working on two books, both under contract at Little, Brown. The first is entitled The Recovering, a work of hybrid memoir, journalism, and archival research examining the relationship between addiction, recovery, and storytelling, which is slated for publication in the Spring of 2018. She is also completing a collection of essays called Ghost Essays, slated for publication in 2019.

John Keene

John R. Keene was born in St. Louis in 1965. He graduated from the St. Louis Priory School, Harvard College, and New York University, where he was a New York Times Fellow. In 1989, Mr. Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and is a Graduate Fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of Annotations, and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. Keene is the recipient of many awards and fellowships—including a MacArthur Genius Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the Whiting Foundation Prize for fiction. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.

Isabel Lucas

Isabel Lucas is a journalist and literary critic. She began her journalism career in television before working for several of Portugal’s most important newspapers and magazines. A freelancer since 2012, she contributes regularly to Publíco, Portugal’s top newspaper, and regularly writes for other publications in Portugal and abroad, focusing principally on American literature. She is the author of two books and coauthor of two others. She has interviewed and reported on some of the most celebrated contemporary American writers. Throughout 2016, she traveled the United States, seeking to understanding the complexity of the country through the prism of its literature. Drawing on these experiences, she published Viagem ao sonho americano (Journey to the Heart of the American Dream) in 2017. Since 2011, she splits her time between Lisbon and the United States.

Alexandre Vidal Porto

Alexandre Vidal Porto was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He is a writer, diplomat, and social activist.  He is the author of two novels: Matias na cidade (Record, 2005) and Sergio Y. (Companhia das Letras, 2014, winner of the Paraná Literature Prize), which has just been published in English by Europa Editions. He writes a weekly column on social issues for Folha de S. Paulo, the leading Brazilian paper, and is also a Harvard-trained lawyer whose advocacy focus on LGBT and minority rights.

Author photo: Ryan Stevenson.

Caroline Rodrigues

Carol Rodrigues was born in Rio de Janeiro and lives in São Paulo. Her first story collection, Sem Vista para o Mar (Edith, 2015), won the Jabuti and Biblioteca Nacional prizes for short stories in 2015. Her second collection, Os Maus Modos, is forthcoming later in 2016 and has received the support of Proac (the São Paulo State Cultural Department). She earned a BA in audiovisual studies at the Federal University of São Carlos and a MA in international performance studies at the University of Amsterdam. In 2016, she was a one of the featured writers at The Script Road literary festival in Macau.

Roberto Taddei

Roberto Taddei is the author of the novels Existe e está aqui e então acaba (Dobra, E-galáxia, 2014) and Terminália (Prumo/Rocco, 2013). He is coordinator of the postgraduate program in writing at the Instituto Vera Cruz in São Paulo and received his master’s in creative writing from Columbia University. In addition to adapting David Foster Wallace short stories for the stage, he also translated Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear for Editora 34. His criticism has appeared in the newspapers Folha de S. Paulo, O Estado de S. Paulo, Jornal da Tarde, and other publications. He was formerly chief editor at estadão.com.br and is editor of the magazineRevera – escritos de criação literária.

Anderson Tepper

Anderson Tepper is co-chair of the international committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival and has served on the advisory and curating committees of the PEN World Voices Festival. An editor at Vanity Fair, he has was written on books and authors for a variety of publications, including Vanity Fair, the New York Times Book Review, the Nation, Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Words Without Borders, and Goodreads, among others.

Ismar Tirelli Neto

Ismar Tirelli Neto is a poet, fiction writer, screenwriter, and translator. Born in 1985 in Rio de Janeiro, he currently lives in Curitiba. He has published four books: synchronoscpio, Ramerrão, Alguns Dias Violentas, and Os Ilhados.