Richard Prins

Bio: Richard Prins is a lifelong New Yorker. He is the author of the hybrid chapbook We May Eat Fruit (Ghostbird Press 2025), which received the 2024 Birdhouse Prize, and translator of the Swahili novel Walenisi (University of Georgia Press), which received a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and 2024 National Endowment For the Arts Translation Fellowship. His work also appears in The Best American Essays 2024.

He received his MFA degree in poetry from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and taught creative writing, and a second MFA degree in literary translation at Queens College, where he currently teaches expository and creative writing.

Current translation projects include translations of the 19th century Swahili poet Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy (1776 - 1840), Katama Mkangi's Africanfuturist Swahili novel Walenisi, and a hybrid project about the anticolonial Hehe chieftain Mkwawa.

Current original projects include a hybrid manuscript about the platypus and a lyric exploration of the history of Swahili hip-hop.

He has taught creative writing to elementary, high school, and college students, as well as disabled adults, and collaborated on Swahili hip-hop and singeli tracks with Tanzanian artists, including members of L.W.P. Majitu and Daz Nundaz.

Other accomplishments include getting arrested for disorderly conduct, criminal trespass, obstructing traffic, obstructing government administration, and resisting arrest in locales such as Trump Tower, Trump International Hotel, the Republican National Convention, and the United States Senate.