Mason Creative Writing is proud to announce Worlds in Words, our spring 2019 series of translation talks, sponsored by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, in collaboration with the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center.
Mark your calendars now for the full series, with all talks to take place 6–7:10 p.m. in the Peterson Health and Family Sciences Hall, Room 1113, except the Forrest Gander & Patricio Ferrari event, which will take place in the Fenwick Library Reading Room:
- Vivek Narayanan—Thursday, February 21, 6:00 p.m.
- Anna Deeny Morales—Thursday, Febuary 28, 6:00 p.m.
- Forrest Gander & Patricio Ferrari—Thursday, March 7, 6:00 p.m. *
- Madhu Kaza—Thursday, April 4, 6:00 p.m.
- Lara Vergnaud—Thursday, April 25, 6:00 p.m.
* Forrest Gander will read from his latest poetry collection, Be With, a 2019 National Book Awards finalist, at 7:30 p.m. in the Fenwick Reading Room following the talk on March 7.
Vivek Narayanan’s books of poetry include Universal Beach (Mumbai: Harbour Line, 2006; re-issued, in a re-imagined US edition by ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni in 2011) and Life and Times of Mr S (HarperCollins, 2012). A full-length collection of his poems in Swedish translation was published in 2015 by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16) as part of work for his ongoing current project, an experimental “writing through” of the Sanskrit of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Narayanan is also the Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal, forum and publisher founded in 2007. He currently teaches in the Honors College at George Mason University.
Anna Deeny Morales is a translator, literary critic, and dramatist. Her translations of Raúl Zurita’s works include Purgatory, Dreams for Kurosawa, and Sky Below, Selected Works, of which she is also the editor. She has also translated works by Mercedes Roffé, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Amanda Berenguer, among others. Original works and adaptations for contemporary dance, theater, and opera include La straniera, Tela di Ragno, Cecilia Valdés, and La Paloma and the Wall. A 2019 National Endowment for the Arts recipient for the translation of Tala by Gabriela Mistral, Deeny Morales holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches at Georgetown University. She co-directs the Gabriela Mistral Youth Poetry Competition.
Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up, for the most part, in Virginia. Trenchant periods of his life were spent in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), and Eureka Springs, Arkansas. With degrees in both geology and English literature, Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, translation, fiction, and essays. He’s the A.K. Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University. A U.S. Artists Rockefeller fellow, Gander has been recipient of grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim, Howard, Witter Bynner and Whiting foundations. His 2011 collection Core Samples from the World was an NBCC and Pulitzer Prize finalist for poetry.
Argentinian-born Patricio Ferrari has translated poetry from French (Alejandra Pizarnik), Portuguese (Fernando Pessoa, António Osório), English (Frank Stanford, Laynie Browne), and Hindi (Vidrohi). A polyglot, his work as a poet, editor, and translator bridges a life between languages. He edited two journals in the U.S. on Pessoa’s English writings (Tagus Press & Gávea Brown) and published eight editions of Pessoa’s works including the first critical edition of his Poèmes français [French Poems] (Paris, Editions de la Différence, 2014) and Teatro Estático [Static Theater] (Tinta-da-china, 2017). Ferrari resides in New York City and teaches at Rutgers University, while serving as President of San Patricio Language Institute (Merlo, Argentina) and pursuing a collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit organization focused on the linguistic diversity of urban areas throughout the world.
Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is the translator of contemporary, feminist Telugu writers Volga and Vimala. Political Stories, her co-translation of a collection of Vimala's fiction was published in 2007 and other translations and original writing have appeared in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Waxwing, Chimurenga, The Encyclopedia Project, Zocalo Public Square, Two Lines and more. She recently co-edited an anthology, What We Love, and edited Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores the connections between migration and translation and which features immigrant, diasporic and poc translators. She directs the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University.
Lara Vergnaud is an editor and literary translator. Her translations from French include Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital (New Directions, 2018) and France, story of a childhood (Yale University Press, 2016), as well as texts by Mohand Fellag, Joy Sorman, and Scholastique Mukasonga, among others. Her writing and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Asymptote, Lit Hub, Words Without Borders, The Brooklyn Rail, and Two Lines Press. Lara has received a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a French Voices Award, and has been long-listed for the National Translation Award.
February 10, 2019
