Meter and Magic

Annie Finch is an award-winning poet, translator, cultural critic, and performance artist. Known for her incantatory poems and mesmerizing performances, Finch is the author of seven volumes of poetry, most recently Earth Days: Poems, Chants, and Spells in Five Directions (Nirala Publications, 2023), Eve and Calendars (both finalists for the National Poetry Series), and Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (awarded the Sarasvati Award). She has written and edited thirteen books on poetic craft, most recently How to Scan a Poem.  Her work has appeared in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of World Literature and been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Awarded the Robert Fitzgerald Award for her lifetime contribution to the Art and Craft of Versification, she has performed her poetry across the U.S. and in India, Mexico, Africa, and throughout Europe. She lives in New York City.

Mani Rao has ten poetry collections, three books in translation including Saundarya Lahari and Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader, and an anthropology of mantra-experience: Living Mantra — Mantra, Deity and Visionary Experience Today. A new edition of her translation of Bhagavad Gita will be released this year from HarperCollins. Featured in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English, Mani has poems and essays in Poetry Magazine, Wasafiri, Meanjin, Iowa Review, Indian Literature, Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, and other journals and anthologies. She has held writing residencies at IPSI Canberra (2019), Omi Ledig House (2018) and IWP Iowa (2005, 2009), has an MFA in Creative Writing from UNLV, and a PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University.