Jon Cho-Polizzi and Lin Hierse in Conversation
On language, place, and belonging
Join us for a lively conversation between author and journalist Lin Hierse and translator-scholar Dr. Jon Cho-Polizzi. Hierse’s writing navigates the complexities of life in contemporary Germany, exploring links between language, place, and belonging across generations. Her works are characterized by complex ambiguities, settings and narratives that compound and merge, demonstrating unexpected connections and continuities. Together they will discuss Hierse‘s explorations of German and Chinese entanglements in her writing, the role of Chinatowns across the diaspora, and the publication of her works in English translation in new and forthcoming anthologies.
Jon Cho-Polizzi is a literary translator and Assistant Professor of German at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He grew up on the Mendocino Coast and studied Literature, History, and Translation at UC Santa Cruz and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg before relocating to the East Bay, where he completed a concurrent PhD in German and Medieval Studies at UC Berkeley. His translation works highlight the radical diversity of contemporary German-language literature, with a focus on the Berlin literary scene. Recent book-length translations include Fatma Aydemir’s Djinns, Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Realm (which was long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award), and Max Czollek’s De-Integrate: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century for which he was awarded the 2024 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. Jon splits his time living and working between Michigan, Northern California, and Berlin.
Lin Hierse is a prolific author, journalist, poet, and public intellectual. With a background in Asian Studies and Human Geography, she is a longtime contributor to several major German journals and periodicals; she wrote the biweekly column “Poetical Correctness” in taz from 2020-2023. Her acclaimed autofictional debut novel Wovon wir träumen [What We Dream Of] was published in 2022 and follows the interconnected stories of three generations of women whose lives are ruptured and reunited through the experience of migration and life in the Chinese diaspora. It was followed in 2024 by her sophomore novel Das Verschwinden der Welt [The Disappearing World], a novel that chronicles the life of an aging tenement building in the outskirts of Shanghai: a one-time refuge for peasants from the Chinese countryside, it later became home to Jewish refugees during WW2, and new urban milieu following the Cultural Revolution, before falling into forgetfulness and disrepair with the rapid gentrification of the 21st-century city. A translation of her short story, “KTV Girl” appeared in the recent English-language anthology Berlin Babel.