The afternoon is the medium: A Rail Reading curated by Aditi Machado

Jahan Khajavi is a poet from Fresno, California living in Rome, Italy with an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and a debut collection of poetry, Feast of the Ass, from Ugly Duckling Presse (2023). Khajavi also has a forthcoming translation with Tim Moore of Sleepless Traveler by Sandro Penna and collaborated on the book The Rubaiyat of Gianni Politi, both from NERO Editions. Recent poems by Khajavi have been included in Nowruz Journal, Ballast, Annulet, Oomph!, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran & Its Diaspora from Green Linden Press, and Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart from Foglifter Press.

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from the Chinese, English, French, and German. Born and raised in China, he was educated at Deep Springs College and Brown University. His works have been published by Conjunctions, FENCE, Kenyon Review, POETRY, The New York Times and elsewhere. His full-length English translations from the Chinese include Zhu Zhu’s The Wild Great Wall (Deep Vellum, 2018) and Song Lin’s The Gleaner Song (Giramondo & Deep Vellum, 2021). He has received fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo and Humboldt Foundations, MacDowell, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, Yaddo, and others. His debut poetry collection The Orange Tree (The University of Chicago Press, March 2023) is the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

Sarah María Medina’s writing has been published in Asymptote, Poetry Magazine, Prelude, Black Warrior Review, Poetry NW, and elsewhere. Her work is also found in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018), and in Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology (Autumn House Press, 2022). She is the recipient of an ARTIST UP Grant LAB, a Jack Straw Writer fellowship, a Caldera AIR, and the Black Warrior Review poetry prize. She is from the American Northwest, and is currently pursuing her PhD in Comparative Literature, the International Writers Track, with a focus on translation and Avant-Garde poetics at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Aditi Machado is the author of two books of poetry, Emporium (Nightboat, 2020) and Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017), as well as several chapbooks/pamphlets the most recent of which is now (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2022). A recipient of the James Laughlin Award and The Believer Poetry Prize, Machado teaches poetry and translation at the University of Cincinnati.