About the Author:
Mai-Linh Hong is a poet and literary scholar. She is the author of Trio House Press Award recipient Continental Drift, and her poetry has received support from Voices of Our Nation, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. Dr. Hong is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). Born in Vietnam and raised in Virginia, she teaches literature at the University of California, Merced.
About Continental Drift:
“To survive is to refuse / death, but how / to tell refusal from retreat?" In the 2025 Trio Award winning poetry collection Continental Drift, Mai-Linh Hong honors and explores the geography that made and continues to shape her ancestors' story, her own story, and the future story of her descendants. From Vietnam to Virginia, California to Thailand, Hong plumbs the fault lines, crosses the oceans, crystallizing moments into meaning. Whether luxuriating in the small joys of nature and of existence, or marveling at the process of geological shift, these artfully crafted poems bring the reader into complex promises and griefs of migration, navigation, and claiming space in a postcolonial world.
About Rajiv:
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of five books of poetry, the latest is Seabeast (Four Way Books 2025). His books have been awarded gold in Forward Indies and Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His other honors include being finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Publishing Triangle Award for Poetry and Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature. His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets. Currently he teaches poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
About Banbas / Exile:
Rajiv Mohabir first learned of the Ramayan from his grandmother while sitting on his parents’ brown-tiled porch, surrounded by the scrub forest of central Florida. Descended from generations of Indian indentured laborers who were brought to Guyana under nefarious contracts, they receive the ancient Hindu epic poem as a tale of exile in anthropomorphic wilderness, passed along as it was in stories and songs shared vocally in the cane fields.
Here, in a singular gesture of deeply layered translation, this ember of song is passed along again. Drawing on his grandmother’s Creole, Caribbean Hindustani, and the King’s English on his own decolonized terms, Mohabir reimagines the Ramayan anew. Classical in form yet rooted in Guyanese ancestry and its diasporas, Banbas / Exile is a genre-bending collection of poetry, stories, songs, and reflective prose. Speaking through heroes, villains, and animal deities, this extraordinary translation gives voice to lives shaped by exile and to the enduring search for a world that can hold both difference and communion.
Learn more about Banbas / Exile at
https://milkweed.org/book/banbasexile