Ashraf FayadhAshraf Fayadh is a Palestinian artist and poet born in Saudi Arabia in 1980. He attended college at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City in 2001, and has been active in the art scene in Saudi Arabia with organizations like Edge of Arabia, a British-Arabin art collaboration. Ashraf has also curated exhibitions of Saudi art during Jeddah Art week in Saudi Arabia and Europe at the 55th Venice Biennale. He is currently imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for apostasy, for the language in these poems.

Mona Kareem is a poet, translator, and journalist based in New York. She published two collections of Arabic poetry in 2002 and 2004, some of which were translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, German, Farsi, and Kurdish. Her third poetry collection Muharij al-Uzla (the clown of solitude) is forthcoming this winter. She is the translator of Ashraf Fayadh's INSTRUCTIONS WITHIN (Operating System, 2016). Mona is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Literature program at Binghamton University. Her dissertation explores issues of subalternity in the Arab feminist novel. She is a founding member of Status Hour, an academic audio journal. Mona pays her bills through teaching writing classes and researching migrant labor in the Middle East. Read More Read Less