Dance & Do Battle: Writers and Translators on Art and Activism
Tamalpais Room | Brower Center | 2150 Allston Way | Berkeley, California
These writers and translators engage with the world in ways that go well beyond the books they’ve published. Acclaimed translator Katherine Silver has aided families detained on the border in the convoluted process of applying for asylum. Aaron Coleman’s new book, “Threat Come Close,” takes on the policing of Blackness and masculinity. Innosanto Nagara’s “A is for Activist” books teach kids the art of resistance. In the words of poet D.A. Powell: “Remember the lesson of West Side Story: one can dance and do battle at the same time.”
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Aaron Coleman is a poet, translator, and scholar of the African Diaspora. He is the author of Red Wilderness (Four Way Books, 2025) and the translator of Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Coleman’s other poetry collections include Threat Come Close (Four Way Book, 2018), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. He is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the Helen Zell Writers’s Program at the University of Michigan.
Katherine Silver has translated and published more than thirty books, mostly of Latin American literature, and her work has been honored by critical acclaim, awards, prizes, and other recognitions. Her most recent and forthcoming translations include works by María Sonia Cristoff, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Juan Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortázar, Daniel Sada, Horacio Castellanos Moya, César Aira, and Pedro Lemebel. She was recently translator-in-residence at the University of Iowa, and is the former director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.
Innosanto Nagara is a children’s author, activist, and graphic designer. He is the author of the bestselling alphabet book A is for Activist as well as the other children’s books Counting on Community, My Night in the Planetarium, and the newly released The Wedding Portrait.
Michael Holtmann has worked in the arts for more than fifteen years. Prior to joining the Center, he held positions at the National Endowment for the Arts and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He has served on the board of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and the international programming committee of the Bay Area Book Festival.