Richard Prins is a lifelong New Yorker. His poetry has been published in dozens of literary journals like Gulf Coast, jubilat and Ploughshares, and his creative nonfiction  has been selected to appear in The Best American Essays 2024. 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), winner of the 2024 Birdhouse Prize

Brain Flavor: A Lyric History of Swahili Hip Hop (No University Press), longlisted for Granum Foundation Prize

Translation of the Swahili novel Walenisi by Katama Mkangi (University of Georgia Press)

Other manuscripts in progress include translations of the 19th century Swahili poet Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy (1776 – 1840), and 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 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.