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Zedan XelefToday 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 Zedan 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. Shookis a poet and translator who lives in Northern California. Their recent translations include Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi'sA Friend's Kitchen, cotranslated from Arabic with Bryar Bajalan, Mikeas Snchez'How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, cotranslated from Zoque and Spanish with Wendy Call, and Conceico Lima'sNo Gods Live Here, translated from Portuguese. Shook's filmA Barcode Scanner, based on Zedan Xelef's poem by the same name, won the 2020 Best Film for Tolerance Prize at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
"""From their ancestral language, these poets bear witness to their own displacement, mass graves, enslavement—and the brutal and unending desire to share love and connection—and in so doing, they are whispering and crying out to the world in a way that cannot be denied . . . these poets persist, and in writing from the deeply honest place of their own experience, they project an enduring Yazidi future."" —Chelsea T. Hicks, language preservationist and author of A Calm and Normal Heart"
