Richard Prins is a lifelong New Yorker. His poetry has been published in dozens of literary journals like Gulf Coast, jubilat and Ploughshares, his creative nonfiction  has been selected to appear in The Best American Essays 2024, and his translations of Swahili literature have been awarded a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a 2024 National Endowment For the Arts Translation Fellowship.

He received his MFA degree in poetry from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and Adjunct Instructor of Creative Writing, and a second MFA degree in literary translation at Queens College, where he teaches writing.

Forthcoming projects include:

We May Eat Fruit (Ghostbird Press 2025), winner of the 2024 Birdhouse Prize

We Are Still in the Fort: Poems by Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy (Vanderbilt University Press 2026), translations of the 19th-century poet from Mombasa, many of which can be read where they first appeared in literary journals under the “Swahili Translations” tab above.

Translation of the Swahili novel They Are Us by Katama Mkangi (University of Georgia Press 2026), which was supported by a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship.

Other manuscripts in progress include a collage of found texts mostly translated from Swahili and German about the anticolonial Hehe chieftain Mkwawa, a lyric history of Swahili hip hop, and a hybrid investigation 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 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.