Jay Boss Rubin is a writer and Swahili-English translator from Portland, Oregon. His book-length translations include Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi (Yale University Press) and New Virus by Halfani Sudy (forthcoming from University of Georgia Press), and he contributed to Two Lines Press’s collection, No Edges: Swahili Stories. His translation and translation-adjacent work has also appeared in Asymptote, The Common, The Hopkins Review, Living in Languages, Northwest Review and other outlets. He was the recipient of a 2022 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and the 2024 Loose Translation Award. He is a proud graduate of the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, and he currently serves as Managing Editor of Portland Tennis Courterly.



From loose pages to issue 119 of our magazine, an anthology of over 100 HLP poets, over a decade of the Loose Award for translated works, the Founders prize for first book in its third year, and a bunch of great books in the works, we couldn’t have come this far without you.