Circumference Reading Series

Circumference: Poetry in Translation presents a reading with acclaimed poets and translators Edith Grossman, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Yvette Siegert, hosted by Hilary Vaughn Dobel.

EDITH GROSSMAN is a translator, critic, and occasional teacher of literature in Spanish. She was born in Philadelphia, attended the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Berkeley, completed a PhD at New York University, and has been the recipient of awards and honors including Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Queen Sofía Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Grossman has brought over into English poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by major Latin American writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Álvaro Mutis, Mayra Montero, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Peninsular works that she has translated include Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, novels by Julián Ríos, Carmen Laforet, Carlos Rojas, and Antonio Muñoz Molina, poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, The Solitudes of Luis de Góngora, and the Exemplary Novels of Miguel de Cervantes.

ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS––winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry––is the author of Heaven (FSG, 2015) and The Ground (FSG, 2012). He translated Salvador Espriu’s story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (Dalkey Archive: 2012) as well as numerous other classic and contemporary works from the Catalan that have appeared in Boston Review, Granta, The Paris Review, Best European Fiction 2010 and Best European Fiction 2011, as selected by Alexander Hemon, and others. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.

YVETTE SIEGERT is a poet and translator based in New York. She has edited for The New Yorker and has taught at Columbia University, Baruch College and the 92nd Street Y. Her writing has appeared in many publications, most recently in Aufgabe, Boston Review, St. Petersburg Review, Stonecutter, The Literary Review and newyorker.com, and her work has received recognition from PEN/New York State Council on the Arts, the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Edited by Elizabeth Clark Wessel and Sam Ross, Circumference: Poetry in Translation publishes work in translation from around the globe, including contemporary poetry, new visions of classical poems, and other pieces that show the act of translation to be vibrant, modern, and necessary. This event is free and open to the public.