Bucharest-born Diana Manole is a proudly hyphenated Romanian-Canadian award-winning writer, literary translator, theater artist, and scholar. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and has been teaching at Canadian universities since 2006. A poet in her own right, her work has been featured in literary magazines in thirteen countries and earned her the 2020 Very Small Verse prize of the League of Canadian Poets and honorable mention in the 2023 Lush Triumphant Poetry contest of subTerrain magazine, Canada. Praying to a Landed-Immigrant God / Rugându-mă la un Dumnezeu emigrant (Grey Borders Books, 2023) is her seventh collection of poems. Diana is also a passionate translator who co-won second prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition (UK) and translated or co-translated seven poetry collections. Independently, she translated two Roma plays from Romania, which were included in the Roma Heroes anthologies (Hungary, 2019 and 2021), and had numerous translations of Romanian poetry published in magazines such as Asymptote, Exchanges, Poet Lore, and ellipse. The originals of the translations featured in this issue belong to the award-winning collection Paznic de noapte [The Night Security Guard] (Casa Cărţilor, 2023) by Emil-Iulian Sude. Most recently, Diana was awarded the Lunch Ticket Issue 24 Gabo Prize (December 2023) for her translations of Sude’s work.