Third Annual Day of Translation Co-presented with the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center
Fenwick Library | George Mason University | 4400 University Drive | Fairfax, Virginia
Join us for our third annual Day of Translation co-presented with the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. All panels and events will take place at the Fenwick Library on the George Mason University campus in Fairfax, Virginia.
All events are free and open to the public.
Writers and translators appearing include Jeffrey Angles, Natascha Bruce, Jennifer Croft, Boris Dralyuk, Shelley Frisch, Emily Goedde, Ezio Neyra, Mui Poopoksakul, Michael Reynolds, Aaron Robertson, Olivia Sears, Amy Stolls, and Jeremy Tiang, among others. Forrest Gander will deliver the keynote address.
Nonfiction in Translation
10:30-11:45 am
Jennifer Croft, Boris Dralyuk, Shelley Frisch, and Emily Goedde
Breaking Boundaries: Representation in Translation
12:00 noon-1:15 pm
Matthew Davis, Ezio Neyra, Mui Poopoksakul, and Aaron Robertson
Contemporary Literature from Asia
3:00-4:15 pm
Jeffrey Angles, Natascha Bruce, Mui Poopoksakul, and Jeremy Tiang
Trends in Translation Publishing
4:15-5:30 pm
Michael Holtmann (Two Lines Press), Michael Reynolds (Europa Editions), Olivia Sears (Two Lines Press), Declan Spring (New Directions), and Amy Stolls (National Endowment for the Arts)
Keynote Address: Forrest Gander
7:00 pm
Forrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator and multi-genre writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, and United States Artists Foundations. His recent book, Twice Alive, focuses on human and ecological intimacies.
Jeffrey Angles is a poet, translator, and professor at Western Michigan University. His collection of Japanese-language poetry won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. His translations of feminist and queer writers from Japan have won numerous awards. Among his recent translations are the feminist writer Itō Hiromi’s contemporary classic The Thorn Puller, the queer poet Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetry collection Only Yesterday, and the science-fiction author Kayama Shigeru’s 1950s novels Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again.
Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her work includes Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon, Bloodline by Patigül, Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong, and Mystery Train by Can Xue. Her translation of Dorothy Tse’s poem “Cloth Birds” was a winner of the 2019 Words Without Borders Poems in Translation Prize.
Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick, and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (a finalist for the Kirkus Prize). In 2023, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her husband and twins.
Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, where he taught Russian literature for a number of years. He is the translator of several volumes from Russian and Polish, including, most recently, Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories. He is also the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, and co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry.
Shelley Frisch holds a doctorate in German literature from Princeton University. She is the author of The Lure of the Linguistic and translator of numerous books from the German, including biographies of Nietzsche, Einstein, and Kafka, for which she was awarded the 2007 Modern Language Association Translation Prize for a Scholarly Study of Literature. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Emily Goedde’s translations and essays have been published or are forthcoming in the anthologies “The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature,” “Nimrod’s Collected Works and Jade Mirror: Women Poets of China,” as well as in Pathlight: New Chinese Writing, The Iowa Review, harlequin creature, Translation Review and The Asian American’s Writers Workshop Transpacific Literary Project. She was named Princeton University’s Translator in Residence for the spring 2019 semester. Goedde earned a master’s in fine arts degree in literary translation from the University of Iowa and a doctoral degree in comparative literature from the University of Michigan.
Ezio Neyra is a Peruvian writer, scholar, editor, and translator. His writing has appeared in Cuba, Chile, Mexico, the United States, and Peru. He is the author of Habrá que hacer algo mientras tanto (2005), Todas mis muertes (2006), Tsunami (2012), and Pasajero en La Habana (2017). A recipient of several fellowships and recognitions and a participant in book fairs worldwide, he has been a writer-in-residence in Mexico City and Rhodes, Greece. In 2003, he founded Matalamanga, a publishing house based in Lima that has published over 30 books by Latin American authors. He was the editor of the Peruvian edition of the Argentinean literary magazine Lamujerdemivida. In Lima he also founded and directed Niñolee, an organization promoting literacy among Peruvian children. He holds a PhD in Latin American Literature at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He also worked for the Peruvian government as Director del Libro y la Lectura, where he had in charge the promotion of reading and of the book industry. Currently, he is living in Santiago, Chile, where he is a professor or Literature at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez.
Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer turned translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. She is the translator of Prabda Yoon’s The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both from Tilted Axis Press. She is translating a novel and a story collection by Duanwad Pimwana, both forthcoming in 2019 from Two Lines Press and Feminist Press, respectively. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the U.S., she now lives in Berlin, Germany.
Michael Reynolds is editor in chief at Europa Editions. He is the author of a collection of short stories entitled Sunday Special, and a book for young readers entitled La notte di Q and illustrated by Brad Holland. He is the editor of 1989, an anthology of ten European writers illustrated by Henning Wagenberth. For Europa Editions his translations include three volumes in Carlo Lucarelli’s De Luca series, children’s fiction by Wolf Erlbruch and Altan, and Daniele Mastrogiacomo’s Days of Fear.
Aaron Robertson has written for various publications including The New York Times, The Nation, n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and more, and he is currently an editor at Literary Hub. He won a 2018 PEN/Heim grant for his translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon.
Olivia E. Sears is a translator of Italian poetry and founder of the Center for the Art of Translation, where she edited the journal Two Lines for over a decade. Her translations of contemporary poet Mariangela Gualtieri have recently appeared in Arkansas International, Circumference, The Common, and Copper Nickel, among others. She is currently completing a manuscript of Gualtieri’s poetry in English, When I Wasn’t Dying.
Declan Spring is Vice President, Senior Editor, and Director of Foreign Rights at New Directions. He received his BA in English from University of Rochester and his MA in English from NYU. He has been working at New Directions since 1991.
Amy Stolls is the Director of Literary Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts, where she oversees the facilitation and review of thousands of applications annually from literary organizations and individuals, including translators of poetry and prose from other languages into English, and publishers and presenters of works in translation. She is the co-editor of the anthology The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation.
Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and Sinophone translator. Recent translations include Liu Xinwu’s The Wedding Party, which was shortlisted for the National Translation Award, as well as novels by Zhang Yueran, Shuang Xuetao, Lo Yi-Chin, Yan Ge and Yeng Pway Ngon. Their novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. Earlier this year they were the Princeton University Translator-in-Residence, and served on the jury of the International Booker Prize. Originally from Singapore, they live in Flushing, Queens.