About the Curator:

ALAM KHORSHED graduated as a Mechanical Engineer from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka and did his Post Graduate studies at Baruch College of City University of New York, USA. He worked for, among others, GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals in Chittagong, and Canadian Aviation Electronics (CAE) in Montreal, Canada. He eventually returned to Bangladesh in 2004 to embrace his real passion: arts and literature. He is now engaged as a full-time writer, translator, critic and arts organizer. After successfully running a unique socio-cultural organization named “Bishaud Bangla” in Chittagong for nine years, he founded a new arts space called “Bistaar: Chittagong Arts Complex” in December 2014, and has been working as its Founding Director since. He has authored more than twenty books in Bengali, mostly works of translation and literary essays. Among them, the most notables are: translations of Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’; ‘Reflections’, an autobiographical book of Henry Miller; an anthology of poems of the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska; a book length conversation between the two great Argentine writers Jorge Louis Borges and Victoria Ocampo translated from the Spanish; ‘The Jaguar Smile’, the first work of non-fiction by Salman Rushdie, and ‘I Shall Marry When I Want’, a Play by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

NABINA DAS is the author of five books. Her poetry collections are Sanskarnama (Red River, 2017), Into the Migrant City (Writers Workshop, 2013), and Blue Vessel (Les Editions du Zaporogue, 2012). Her debut book is a novel titled Footprints in the Bajra (Cedar Books, 2010), and her short fiction volume is titled The House of Twining Roses: Stories of the Mapped and the Unmapped (LiFi Publications, 2014). A Rutgers-Camden MFA alumna, Nabina is the editor of WITNESS, poetry of Dissent (Red River, 2021), and co-editor of 40 under 40, an Anthology of Post-globalisation Poetry (Poetrywala, 2016). Nabina’s poems appear in Poetry (Poetry Foundation), Prairie Schooner, Indian Literature (National Academy of Letters), Caravan, Poetry at Sangam, The IndianQuarterly, Economic and Political Weekly, Dhaka Tribune, The Yellow Nib Anthology (Queens University, Belfast), and Six Seasons Review, among several others. Nabina is a 2017 Sahapedia-UNESCO fellow, a 2012 Charles Wallace Creative Writing alumna (Stirling University, Scotland), and a 2016 Commonwealth Writers features correspondent.Nabina has worked most recently as a teaching faculty, a journalist for 10 years, and also as media executive in NGOs and industry bodies like the CII (Confederation of Indian Industries), in the area of Gender, Development, Child Welfare, and Environment. She writes columns and commentaries for several newspapers and journals. Born and brought up in Guwahati, Assam, she is also a 2012 Sangam House, a 2011 NYS Summer Writers Institute, and a 2007 Wesleyan Writers Conference creative writing alumna. Nabina’s new poetry collection Anima and the Narrative Limits will appear in 2022 from Yoda Press.