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.

Projects include:

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

Brain Flavour: A Lyric History of Swahili Hip Hop (No University Press 2026), longlisted for 2024 Granum Prize

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

They Are Us (University of Georgia Press 2026), a translation of the Swahili novel by Katama Mkangi, 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 and a hybrid investigation of the platypus.

He currently teaches creative writing at Queens College, and has also worked as a teaching artist with elementary and high school students, as well as disabled adults.

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, the United States Senate, and the Israeli consulate.