KGB Bar

Kirmen Uribe was born in 1970 in Ondarroa, Spain, where he currently lives and writes. His debut poetry collection, Bitartean heldu eskutik, won Spain’s 2001 Premio de la Crítica, and has since been translated from the Basque original into Spanish and French, and in 2007 into English as Meanwhile Take My Hand (Graywolf), which was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Poetry in Translation award.  Uribe is also a newspaper columnist and the author of a number of books for young people, and has been a teacher and lyricist, working with many Basque musicians and artists on multimedia projects. Bilbao New York Bilbao is his first novel.

Elizabeth Macklin is the author of two poetry collections, You’ve Just Been Told and A Woman Kneeling in the Big City. She has been a recipient of an Ingram Merrill Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. In 2000, she spent an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship year in Bilbao, Spain, beginning studies in the Basque language. Her translations of Kirmen Uribe’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Circumference, and Open City, and in 2005 she won a PEN Translation Fund grant for Meanwhile Take My Hand. She is currently at work on poems for a third collection.