Our Team

Terry Craven

Terry Craven earned his bookselling experience with 7 years working at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, before heading to Spain, where he now resides as a painter, editor, and co-founder/co-manager of Desperate Literature bookshop, Madrid. He has had writing published with 3:AM and The London Magazine (forthcoming).

Elizabeth Moe

Elizabeth Moe holds a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature & Culture from Rutgers University. Her dissertation, “Embodied Lorquian Archives,” examines the early and continued artistic activism to evoke and invoke poet-playwright Federico García Lorca’s missing body and textual corpus. She lives in Madrid.

Clarissa Watson

Clarissa is a writer and technologist who lives in Madrid. She has been published in the World Economic Forum, WIRED Magazine and Hacker Noon. From 2013 to 2015 she was a copywriter at McCann Worldgroup and is presently the Director of Communications at the IE School of Human Sciences and Technology. Clarissa supports the series with creative direction, designing and producing content, while directing the Unamuno Author Series brand.

Layla Benitez-James

Layla Benitez-James is an artist and translator living in Alicante whose poems and translations have appeared in The Acentos Review, Anomaly, Guernica, Waxwing, Revista Kokoro, La Galla Ciencia, and elsewhere. Her audio essays about translation can be found at Asymptote Journal Podcast. Her first chapbook, God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure was selected by Major Jackson for the 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and published by Jai-Alai Books in Miami, April 2018.

Annie Schumacher

Annie Schumacher is a poet and editor living in Madrid. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Our Little Roses poetry fellowship. Recent work can be seen in Poetry London, The Cortland Review, and The Adelaide Literary Magazine.

Charlotte Delattre

Charlotte Delattre is the co owner of Desperate Literature. She managed an international arts exchange program for Americans in Paris before working at Shakespeare and Company and finally joining the Madrid bookshop partnership in 2015. She is specialized in French literature and the performing arts.

Joan Fleming

Joan Fleming is the author of The Same as Yes and Failed Love Poems, both from Victoria University Press, and the chapbook Two Dreams in Which Things Are Taken (Duets). Her new collection Dirt is forthcoming with Cordite Books. She holds a PhD in ethnopoetics from Monash University, Melbourne, and is the New Zealand/Aotearoa Commissioning Editor for Cordite Poetry Review. Her honours include the Biggs Poetry Prize, a Creative New Zealand writing fellowship, an Australian Postgraduate Award, the Verge Prize for Poetry, and the Harri Jones Memorial Prize from the Hunter Writers Centre. In 2019 she served as Impresario for the Unamuno Author Series Festival in Madrid, and in 2020 she will travel to Honduras for the Our Little Roses Poetry Teaching Fellowship.

Jorge Vessel

Jorge Vessel (pseudonym for Jorge Garcia) is a Venezuelan writer, translator and engineer. His first book, Pájaro de Cuero Negro (CELARG, 2004), won the Poetry Prize Fernando Paz Castillo (Venezuela) and La Carencia (2018) won Premio de Poesía Federico Muelas (Spain) and will be published in 2019. His poems have appeared in important Hispano-American poetry anthologies such as En-Obra (Equinoccio, 2008) and Cuerpo Plural (Pre-Textos, 2010), as well as literary magazines. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and is engaged in multiple projects of poetry translation into Spanish.