[glint of water on the river’s skin]

Rania Mamoun is a Sudanese writer and human rights activist. She has published two novels in Arabic—Green Flash (2006) and Son of the Sun (2013)—as well as a short story collection, Thirteen Months of Sunrise, which was translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette and published by Comma Press in 2018. Her stories and articles have been widely published and she has also worked as an editor on the culture pages of Al-Thaqafi magazine.

Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian writer living in Paris. Her essays, poetry, visual art, and translations from Arabic and French appear widely, including in Harper’s, the Paris Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is currently working on a new translation of One Thousand and One Nights for W. W. Norton. Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi, a collaborative project with Robin Moger, is forthcoming from Tenement Press.