Shook is a poet and translator based at Newt Beach, in Northern California. Their 20-plus book-length translations include Jorge Eduardo Eielson's Room in Rome and Mario Bellatin's Beauty Salon. In 2013 Shook founded Phoneme Media, now an imprint of Deep Vellum Publishing, which has since published translations from over 35 languages. Recent honors include the 2021 Words Without Borders/Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Prize for a poem from the São Toméan Conceição Lima's forthcoming selected poems, a 2021 Global Africa Translation Fellowship from The Africa Institute, and the 2020 Prize for Tolerance at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, for a video poem featuring the work of Zêdan Xelef. In addition to their work at Phoneme, Shook founded and oversees the avión imprint for Gato Negro Ediciones in Mexico City and Kashkul Books, a multilingual publishing project in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

Jorge Eduardo Eielson was born in Lima on April 13, 1924 to a Peruvian mother and a Swedish father. After attending several different schools, at the end of his secondary studies he met the writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas, who introduced him to Lima’s artistic and literary circles, and to a wealth of knowledge about the ancient civilizations of Peru. Three years later, at the age of 21, he won the National Poetry Award. He went on to receive the National Drama Award in 1948, the same year that the prestigious Lima Gallery hosted a well received exhibition of his visual art. In 1951, he traveled to Italy for a summer vacation and decided to settle in Rome, where he met his life partner, Michele Mulas. During this period he wrote his masterpiece Habitación en Roma (Room in Rome), and the two novels El cuerpo de Giulia-No (The body of Giulia-No) and Primera muerte de María (The first death of María). In the late 1950s, he began to texturize his works on canvas with organic materials such as earth, sand, and clay. This eventually led to his depiction of human forms using textiles, and in 1963 he began work on what would become his first quipu, reinventing this ancient Andean form with fabrics in brilliant colors, knotted and tied on canvas. Eielson’s quipus were exhibited to wide acclaim at the 1964 Venice Biennale. In the mid-1970s, he returned to Peru to study pre-Columbian art more deeply; during this period, the Instituto Nacional de Cultura (National Institute of Culture) published the bulk of his poetry under the title Poesía escrita (Written poetry). Later in that decade, he moved to Milan, where he would spend the rest of his life writing, studying Zen, and producing his art, which was exhibited around the world. After the death of his partner in 2002, Eielson’s own health deteriorated significantly, though his life was brightened by the discovery of several relatives previously unknown to him, including his sister Olivia. The poet died on March 8, 2006, and his ashes were laid to rest beside his partner’s in the small cemetery in Bari Sardo.