Monday

Ben Mirov grew up in Northern California. He is the author of Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010) and I is to Vorticism (New Michigan Press, 2010). He is poetry editor of LIT Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn.

Solmaz Sharif was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents. She holds a BA in Sociology and Women of Color Writers from U.C. Berkeley and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, Diagram, Witness, and PBS’s Tehran Bureau. Between 2002-2006, Sharif studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. She has taught creative writing at U.C. Berkeley, New York University, Goldwater Hospital, and Berkeley High School. In 2009, she was a semifinalist for the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She has been the managing director of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop since January 2010.