Mbarek Sryfi, poet and translator, teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. His work has been widely published in many journals and magazines, and anthologies including Al Arabiyya, ArabLit Quarterly, Banipal, CEELAN Review, Metamorphoses, Middle Eastern Literatures, Nick Virgilio Haiku Association, The Journal of North African Studies, The Markaz Review, Translation Review, and World Literature Today, among others. Sryfi has co-authored Perspectives: Arabic Language and Culture in Film (2009), co-translated five books, The Monarch of the Square (2014), The Arabs and the Art of Storytelling (2014), The Elusive Fox (2016), The Blueness of the Evening (2018), and With Urgency (2021), and published two poetry collections in English, The Trace of a Smile (2018) and City Poems (2020).