Tesfamariam Woldemariam (1948-2015) joined the armed struggle of Eritrea's nationalist independence movement in the mid-1970s. He was a leading intellectual, writing in Tigrinya and establishing Tigrinya journals. Internal conflicts within Eritrea’s liberation forces compelled him to immigrate to Sudan in the early 1980s and eventually to the United States. Woldemariam continued to write poetry and occasionally published political and cultural essays, eventually returning to Eritrea in 2014 to work on a new collection of his poetry. “Our Village” comes from this last volume, a 300-page critically annotated collection entitled ህያው ደብሪ (Hiyaw Debri), or The Living Monastery.