Participants

Satoshi Kitamura is an award-winning author and illustrator of children’s books and graphica. His books include When Sheep Cannot Sleep, My Hand, and Lily Takes a Walk. He has collaborated with numerous writers and poets, notably in The Young Inferno, a retelling of Dante’s Inferno, with John Agard.

Aoko Matsuda has published four collections of short stories and two books of essays. Her work in translation has been published in Granta and in Monkey Business. Her chapbook The Girl Who Is Getting Married was published in the UK. She is also the Japanese translator for the American author Karen Russell; she has translated Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

Jim Rugg is an award-winning cartoonist. His art has been exhibited and published around the world. His books include Street Angel, Afrodisiac, and The PLAIN Janes. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and cats, teaches at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and makes comics at streetangelcomic.com.

Adam Ehrlich Sachs has published fiction in the New Yorker, n+1, and Harper’s. His first book, Inherited Disorders, was described in Publishers Weekly as “Stellar… An assortment of absurdist scenarios from a Harvard-trained intellect with the timing of a borscht belt comedian.” Sachs lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, the Russian literature scholar Tatyana Gershkovich.

Ted Goossen, co-editor of Monkey Business, teaches Japanese literature and film at York University in Toronto. He is the general editor of the Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and has published translations of stories and essays by Hiromi Kawakami, Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, Sachiko Kishimoto and Naoya Shiga, among others.

Motoyuki Shibata, founder and co-editor of Monkey Business, teaches American literature and literary translation at the University of Tokyo. He has translated Paul Auster, Rebecca Brown, Stuart Dybek, Steve Erickson, Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, Richard Powers and Charles Simic, among others.

Lina Insana is Associate Professor of Italian and chair of the Department of French & Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches post-Unification Italian literature, film, and culture. Her published research has focused primarily on representations of the Holocaust, with particular emphasis on the intersection of Holocaust and translation studies, most notably in Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (U of Toronto Press, 2009). More recently, her work has turned to questions of space and place, island studies, and critical geography in exploring post-Unification Sicilian cultural production. Her current research project is entitled “Charting the Island: Position and Belonging in Sicily from Unification to the European Union” and examines the discourses and cultural production that position Sicily within larger frameworks of belonging such as “Italy,” “Europe,” and “the Mediterranean.”

Charles Exley is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include modern and contemporary Japanese literature, Asakusa opera, and Japanese western remakes. He is the author of Satō Haruo and Modern Japanese Literature (Brill Japan Studies Library, 2016) and co-editor of Old Crimes, New Scenes: A Century of Innovations in Japanese Mystery Fiction (forthcoming from Merwin Asia). His current research includes border bending in detective fiction and the global scope of vaudeville and popular musical theater.