PEOPLE
CO-DIRECTORS
Dr. Andrea Grieder is a social anthropologist (PhD from University of Zurich and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris). She is the Director of Transpoesis, a Rwanda-based poetry organisation with the aim of empowering youth through the arts. She is a poet and poetry video producer for the poetry label Transpoesis.
Daniele Pantano is a Swiss poet, essayist, literary translator, and Founding Director of the Refugee Poetry Project. Pantano taught at the University of South Florida (where he was also Director of the Writing Center), served as the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Florida Southern College, and directed the creative writing programme at Edge Hill University, where he was Reader in Poetry and Literary Translation. He is currently Associate Professor (Reader) in Creative Writing and Programme Leader for the MA Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln. For more information, please visit www.pantano.ch.
INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS
Rohingya, Myanmar, Lybia, Syria
James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist. His most recent poetry collections are The Caprices, a response to Francisco Goya's "Los Caprichos" (Arc, 2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, US, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, UK, 2015). He was the editor of The Wolf, an influential, internationally-minded literary magazine between 2002 and 2017. In 2012 he co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012, Northern Illinois University Press, 2013) and he co-edited I am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. He is the co-editor of Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Edge Hill University Press/Arc, 2017) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, published by Bloodaxe in 2009. Byrne received a PhD from Edge Hill University and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he was given a Stein Fellowship (‘Extraordinary International Scholar’). He was the Poet in Residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge and is currently Reader in Contemporary Literature at Edge Hill University. Byrne has given readings in Libya and Syria and his Selected Poems / Poemas Escogidos are published by Buenos Aires Poetry. He has translated poems by Myanmar and Rohingya poets, among others. He is the International Editor for Arc Publications and his poems have been translated into several languages including Arabic, Burmese and Chinese. Forrest Gander writes that reading Everything Broken Up Dances is "like gulping firewater shots of the world." John Kinsella declares Byrne "a complete original."