Poetry in Translation: A Reading at the 2023 NYC Poetry Festival

Join members of PEN America’s Translation Committee on the Brinkley stage at this year’s New York City Poetry Festival. The 30-minute reading will feature the work of award-winning authors and translators Nancy Naomi Carlson, Katrine Øgaard Jensen, Mary Ann Newman, and Esperanza Hope Snyder.

LEARN MORE

Every summer, The New York City Poetry Festival invites poetry organizations and collectives of all shapes and sizes to bring their unique formats, aesthetics, and personalities to the festival grounds, which are ringed with a collection of beautiful Victorian houses and tucked beneath the wide, green canopies of dozens of century old trees. By uniting the largest community of poets in the country and offering a unique setting for literary activity, the New York City Poetry Festival electrifies arts and literature and brings poetry to new light in the public eye.

Be sure to find PEN America’s booth on the festival map you’ll receive at the entrance!

The PEN America Translation Committee advocates on behalf of literary translators, working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. Learn more about the committee here.

participants

Nancy Naomi Carlson is the Translations Editor for On the Seawall, and is a poet and translator whose translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull, 2021), which won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and was a finalist for the Sarah Maguire Poetry Translation Prize. Decorated with the French Academic Palms and twice awarded NEA literature translation grants, she’s the author of An Infusion of Violets (Seagull Books, 2019) and the co-translator (with Esperanza Hope Snyder) of Delicates (Seagull books, 2023) by Cuban poet Wendy Guerra—both recommended by The New York Times.

Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a writer and translator from the Danish. She is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Danish Arts Foundation’s Young Artistic Elite Fellowship in 2020 as well as the 2018 National Translation Award in Poetry for her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s book-length poem Third-Millennium Heart (Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books, 2017). Her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Outgoing Vessel (Action Books, 2021) was a finalist for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Her latest translation, My Jewel Box by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, was published by Action Books in March 2022. She teaches creative writing and literary translation in the School of the Arts MFA Writing Program at Columbia University.

Mary Ann Newman is a translator by vocation and cultural administrator by profession. She has translated such major Catalan authors as Quim Monzó, Josep Carner, and Josep Maria de Sagarra. Her professional life has revolved around Catalan and Hispanic literatures and cultures. She was the founder of the Catalan Studies Program and the Catalan Center at New York University. She is the founder and executive director of the Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the U.S., a member of the board of the Premi Internacional Catalunya (International Catalonia Award), and of the advisory board of Diplocat, the Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia. In 1998 she received the Creu de Sant Jordi (Cross of St. George), the highest honor awarded by the Catalan government and was awarded the 2017 North American Catalan Society Prize for her translation of Private Life.

Esperanza Hope Snyder’s poems and translations have appeared in Blackbird, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, International Poetry Review, Free State Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, and other journals. She’s the recipient of poetry fellowships at The Gettysburg Review and The Kenyon Review. Honors include the Donald Everitt Axinn Award in Poetry for Bread Loaf. Assistant Director of Bread Loaf in Sicily, co-coordinator of the Lorca Prize, Esperanza is the author of the poetry collection, Esperanza and Hope (Sheep Meadow Press), and two plays, Lullaby for George and The Back Room.