Property of the Imagination: Caribbean Literature in Translation (2019 AWP Conference)
C125-126 | Oregon Convention Center | Level 1 | Portland, Oregon
Linguistically and culturally diverse, Caribbean literatures have developed out of shared but fragmented histories of colonialism, slavery, migration, and syncreticism. While these countries are geographically close to the US, they remain underrepresented in international literature. Four translators of writers from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Martinique, and Haiti share their translations and speak about what has drawn them into the luminescent world of Caribbean writing. Sponsored by ALTA.
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.
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.
Kristin Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She is featured in the Words Without Borders Translator Relay, June 2020. Her new poems appear in Seedings, The Hopper online, La Noria, and Lana Turner Journal. Previously the University of Alabama Press published four of Dykstra’s book-length translations of Cuban poetry. Jacket2 published her A- Z commentary series on translation, “Intermedium.”
Linda Coverdale has a PhD in French Studies and has translated more than eighty books. A Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, she has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, several Scott Moncrieff, French Voices, and French-American Foundation Translation Prizes, the MLA Scaglione Prize, the Best Translated Book Award Fiction, and the Dolman Best Travel Book of the Year Award.