[VIRTUAL] Women in Translation Month Reading Series (Session 1)
Moderator: Piotr Florczyk
Kelsi Vanada (translator) and Natalia Litvinova (Spanish)
Arthur Reiji Morris (translator) and Li Kotomi (Japanese)
Kira Josefsson (translator) and Hanna Johansson (Swedish)
Adriana X. Jacobs (translator) and Vaan Nguyen (Hebrew)
Julia Grawemeyer (translator) and Marie-Christine Bernard (French)
Moderator
Piotr Florczyk has published 10 volumes of Polish poetry translations, including Julian Kornhauser’s I’m Half of Your Heart: Selected Poems and Anna Świrszczyńska’s Building the Barricade, which won the 2017 Found in Translation Award and the 2017 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.
Panelists
Kelsi Vanada’s translations include Sergio Espinosa’s Into Muteness (Veliz Books, 2020) and Berta García Faet’s The Eligible Age (Song Bridge Press, 2018). She is the author of the poetry chapbook Rare Earth (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Vanada is the program manager of The American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, AZ.
Natalia Litvinova is an Argentine poet, translator, and coeditor of the press Editorial Llantén. She was born in Gomel, Belarus, and has lived in Buenos Aires since her family’s immigration in 1996. Her books have been translated into multiple languages and published in Argentina and elsewhere. She teaches writing classes.
Arthur Reiji Morris is a translator from the Japanese. His translation of Solo Dance by Li Kotomi is his first full-length literary translation and will be published by World Editions in 2022.
Li Kotomi is a bilingual Japanese-Chinese writer, translator, and interpreter. She was born in Taiwan in 1989 and moved to Japan in 2013. In 2017, she won the 60th Gunzō New Writers’ Prize for her first novel, Solo Dance, written in Japanese, her second language.
Kira Josefsson is a writer, editor, and literary translator working between English and Swedish. A PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant winner, her work has appeared in Granta, Words Without Borders, The Nation, and elsewhere.
Hanna Johansson (born 1991) is an author and critic who writes about art, literature, and queer themes. Antiken is her debut novel.
Adriana X. Jacobs is a poet, scholar, and translator of modern Hebrew poetry. Her translations have appeared in Gulf Coast, World Literature Today, North American Review, among others. Her translation of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press, 2021) was supported by a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.
Vaan Nguyen is the author of the poetry collections The Truffle Eye (Ma’ayan Press, 2013) and Vain Ratio (Barchash, 2018). In addition to poetry, she has worked as an actress, journalist, and social activist. She currently lives in Jaffa, Israel, and is writing her first novel.
Julia Grawemeyer’s translations have appeared with Schaffner Press; Kenyon Review; and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She teaches the Kenyon Review’s Young Writers workshop, as well as French and intercultural communication to middle schoolers. She received a translation grant from the CNL for her upcoming translation of Estelle-Sarah Bulle’s novel Where Dogs Bark with Their Tails.
Marie-Christine Bernard was born in 1966 in Carleton-sur-Mer and lives in Quebec. She teaches literature, creative writing, film analysis, and ethnology. She collaborated over several years with the Nehirowisiw community to listen to their stories and create her novel Matisiwin.