Robyn Creswell graduated from Brown University in 1999 and received a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2011. He is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University and the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut. He is the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images and The Tongue of Adam, both from the French, as well as Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison, from the Arabic. All three translations were published by New Directions. His essays and reviews have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. He is a former fellow of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and of the American Academy in Berlin, and a former poetry editor at the Paris Review.