[VIRTUAL] Women in Translation Month Reading Series (Session 3)

Moderator: Nancy Naomi Carlson
Denise Kripper (translator) and Adriana Riva (Spanish)
Takako Lento (translator) and Mari Kashiwagi (Japanese)
Karen Leeder (translator) and Ulrike Almut Sandig (German)
Heather Jeanne Denyer (translator) and Hermine Yollo (French)
Alex Zucker (translator) and Petra Hůlová (Czech)

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Moderator

Nancy Naomi Carlson, twice a National Endowment for the Arts literature translation grant recipient, has published 11 titles (seven translated). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull Books, 2019) was called “new and noteworthy” by The New York Times. Her translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude was published in February by Seagull Books.

Panelists

Denise Kripper is a literary translator and a translation scholar. She is also the translation editor at Latin American Literature Today and a founding member of the Third Coast Translators Collective in Chicago.

Adriana Riva has an extensive career as a journalist. She is the author of the short story collection Angst (Tenemos las Máquinas, 2017) and the illustrated biography of María Elena Walsh, Entre las hojas que cantan (Diente de León, 2018). La sal (Odelia editora, 2019) is her first novel.

Takako Lento has published 10 books of English translations of Japanese poetry, including a co-translation of Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson with W.S. Merwin, a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Born and educated in Japan, she holds an MFA in poetry and translation from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Wilmington, DE.

Mari Kashiwagi is a Japanese poet and art curator. She received the Gendaishi Techo Award for emerging young poets in 1995. She has been invited to read at Struga Poetry Evenings (Macedonia), InterLese (Germany), and The Princeton Festival (United States). She has published three books of poetry. She lives in Chiba, Japan.

Karen Leeder is a writer, critic, and translator of contemporary German literature. Her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Thick of it (Seagull Books, 2018) won an English PEN prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and was runner-up for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (2019). Her translation of Sandig’s new collection was shortlisted for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Ulrike Almut Sandig has written two books of short stories, four volumes of poetry, and a novel (2020). She works with filmmakers and musicians, and her debut album with poetry band Landschaft appeared in 2018. Sandig has won many prizes, including most recently the Erich Loest Prize (2020).

Dr. Heather Jeanne Denyer teaches world theater at California State University, Fullerton. Her scholarship focuses on women and puppetry in African theater. She translates plays from French to English. Her work was included in readings for the PEN World Voices Festival.

Hermine Yollo is a Cameroonian actress and director who writes, as she likes to put it. The daughter of performers, she began studying theater seriously in 2000. In 2016, she began to write to share publicly.

Alex Zucker’s translations include novels by J. R. Pick, Petra Hůlová, Jáchym Topol, Magdaléna Platzová, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. He is a winner of the American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Award and two English PEN Writing in Translation awards.

Petra Hůlová’s eight novels and three plays—defined by her once as “3G”: gender, generations, geography—have won numerous awards and have been translated into 13 languages. She studied language, culture, and anthropology at universities in Prague, Ulan Bator, and New York, and was a Fulbright Scholar in the United States.