I write and translate poetry and prose that centers anticolonial resistance and literary form across the Middle East (Palestine and Iran) and the Caucasus.

I am the author of Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (2023), The Persian Prison Poem (2021), and Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (2016). With Malaka Mohammad Shwaikh, I co-authored Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine (2023). My translations include House Arrest: Poems of Hasan Alizadeh (Arc Publications, 2022) with Kayvan Tahmasebian, which received a PEN Translates Award from English PEN. I translate from Persian, Georgian, and Russian, with a particular focus on poetry.

I grew up mostly in the US and have lived and worked across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. My years in Berlin, Tbilisi, Singapore, Palestine, and Budapest are the subject of my fiction, which is published in the short story collection Strangers (2025).

I review books and share literary commentary through my newsletter, The Textual Materialist (https://rgould.substack.com/), and on my YouTube channel, Poetry & Protest (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGbz...). My reading log is available on my website (https://rrgould.hcommons.org/what-im-...), although it needs an update.

Find me on Medium, Bluesky, and Twitter under @rrgould. Out-of-print works like Beautiful English are preserved in open-access archives.