City Lights welcomes Jay Boss Rubin to read from his translation of Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi, a banned Swahili classic finally available in English. He will be joined in conversation by Annmarie Drury to celebrate the work and legacy of one of Tanzania’s most revered writers.
Rosa Mistika is a radical narrative exploration of womanhood, maternal love, agency, and authority—and the first-ever Swahili novel to address issues of domestic violence, sexual coercion, and abortion. Through the story of a young woman and her community it poses the enduring question: To what degree are we responsible for the choices we make, and to what degree are we acted upon by forces outside our control?
Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944–2020) was a Tanzanian novelist, poet, and scholar.
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Jay Boss Rubin is a writer and translator from Portland, Oregon. His translations from Swahili to English have been published by or are forthcoming from Two Lines Press, Yale University Press, Asymptote, The Common, The Hopkins Review and Northwest Review. He is a graduate of the Queens College, City University of New York MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.
Annmarie Drury is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York, where she teaches workshops in literary translation in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses in Victorian literature. She is the translator and editor of Stray Truths (Michigan State University Press, 2015), a selection of Euphrase Kezilahabi’s poetry. She is also editor of The Imaginative Vision of Abdilatif Abdalla’s ‘Voice of Agony’ (University of Michigan Press, 2024) and the author of Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2015), as well as of many articles and essays about Swahili poetry and 19th-century British literature. Many of her own poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Raritan, and elsewhere. As part of an international collective, she translates poetry from 19th-century Lamu, on the present-day coast of Kenya.