Holly Melgard is the author Read Me: Selected Works (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), which surveys her poems, short stories, critical essays and creative book projects produced over the last fifteen years, as well as Fetal Position (Roof, 2021), a poetry book named one of “Artforum’s Best of 2021.” Prior to this, she co-founded and co-edited Troll Thread Press for over a decade, a dual release print-on-demand + free .pdf platform that straddles the digital and print paradigms, where she self-published ten other books of poems including The Making of The Americans and The Poems for Baby Trilogy. Her work has appeared in Best American Anthology of Experimental Writing, BOMB Magazine, LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the German journal Merkur among other places. She currently holds a PhD in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo, and lives in New York City where she teaches writing.

Sandeep Bhagwati is a multiple award-winning composer, theatre director, poet and academic, born in Mumbai (India). He studied composition and conducting at Mozarteum Salzburg and Musikhochschule München, and computer music at IRCAM Paris. His operas, multi-disciplinary staged works, compositions and comprovisations are performed worldwide at leading venues, festivals, theatres and museums and by renowned ensembles* and by eminent soloists**. He has published widely, both as a public voice and in academia, and is a sought-after keynote speaker and jury member and has founded/curated inter-arts festivals (e.g. A*Devantgarde München) and trans-traditional (a term he coined in 2010) projects with Asian composer-performers and European new music ensembles. Professor of Composition at Karlsruhe Music University since 2000, he became Canada Research Chair for Inter-X Arts at Concordia University Montreal in 2006. There he founded matralab, a interdisciplinary and trans-traditional research/creation node for live arts. Since 2013, he founded and directs trans-traditional music ensembles in Berlin, Pune, and Toronto. Between 2017-2023, he led the TENOR Network, a global research forum for new music notation practices and technologies. Since 2020, he is co-founder / co-editor of “TURBA - The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation”. His artistic work was the focus of a “Homage Season” 2023/24 initiated by the Quebec New Music Society (SMCQ) and has been a consultant for New Music Concerts Toronto since 2022.

Photo credit: Alain Lefort

Daniel Voth is Métis from the Métis Nation of the Red River Valley. He is a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation and several other provincial affiliates including the Otipemisiwak Métis Government (formerly the Métis Nation of Alberta). Raised in Winnipeg’s inner city and Manitoba’s Interlake region, his research focuses on the political relationships between Métis and First Nations people with particular attention to the way settler-imposed power structures and land dispossession undermine important gender orientations to governance. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary, and served as the Director of the International Indigenous Studies Program from 2019 - 2022. He is also a co-convener of the Indigenous Relationality workshop with Drs. Matthew Wildcat, Shalene Jobin, Gina Starblanket, Jessie Loyer and PhD student Ryan Crosschild. Together they run the Prairie Relationality Network with a research focus on prairie Indigenous philosophers, the study and practice of relationality, and Indigenous political action. 

Daniel earned his Honours BA from the University of Winnipeg in 2007. With experience both inside and outside the Manitoba Legislative Assembly, Daniel returned to higher education and earned his PhD from UBC in 2015. In his time as the Director of the International Indigenous Studies Program he designed and implemented a new governance protocol for the program, was part of a team that compared Indigenous Studies programs in North America and the Pacific rim, and served as an expert external reviewer for other Indigenous Studies programs in Canada. From 2022-2023 Daniel held the Fulbright Research Chair in Indigenous Issues at San Diego State University. His research has been published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, the University of Toronto Law Journal, twice in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Canadian Journal of Urban Research, Wicazo Sa and several book chapters.

Dr. Chris Clarke is a literary translator and scholar currently teaching in the Translation Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. His translations from French and Spanish include books by Raymond Queneau, Pierre Mac Orlan, Éric Chevillard, and Julio Cortázar, among others. He was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for fiction in 2019 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, a prize for which he was also a finalist in 2017 for his translation of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth, published by NYRB Classics.

Santiago Artozqui is a writer and translator living near Paris, France. He has translated some sixty books from English and Spanish into French. He has been president of ATLAS, an organization for the promotion of literary translation, and in 2016, he co-founded the online literary journal En attendant Nadeau and became its publishing director. He is also a member of the Outranspo (L’Ouvroir de Translation Potential), a literary group dedicated to creative translation. His translations include books by R. L. Stevenson, Maya Angelou, Roxane Gay, Amanda Gorman, Martin Luther King and Matthew Baker.

Cole Swensen is a poet and a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism. Her poetry has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the Griffin Prize. Her more than twenty volumes of translated poetry include three finalists for the Open Letters Best Translated Book Award, two for ALTA’s National Translation Award, and finalists for the Stephen Mitchell Prize, the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and the Big Other Translation Award, and her translation of Jean Frémon’s Island of the Dead won the PEN USA Award in Translation. She divides her time between Paris and San Francisco.