Richard Prins

Bio: Richard Prins is a lifelong New Yorker who has lived, worked, studied and recorded music in Dar es Salaam. He is the author of the chapbook We May Eat Fruit (Ghostbird Press 2025) and Brain Flavour: A Lyric History of Swahili Hip Hop (No University Press 2026), and translator of the volume of Swahili poetry by Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy We Are Still in the Fort (Vanderbilt University Press 2026) as well as Katama Mkangi's Africanfuturist novel They Are Us (University of Georgia Press 2027), 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 creative writing.

Current projects include a manuscript consisting of found texts translated from Swahili and German about the anticolonial Hehe chieftain Mkwawa, and a hybrid exploration of the platypus.

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.