Peter Cole’s most recent book of poems is “Draw Me After” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His new translations include “Requiem and Other Poems,“ by Aharon Shabtai (New Directions, 2025), which won the National Jewish Book Award. He recently published “That Simple? … That Complicated: Conversations on Poetry and Translation” (Free Poetry, 2024).
Cole has translated widely from Hebrew and Arabic, medieval and modern, and has received numerous honors for his work, including a PEN Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Jewish Book Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
Aharon Shabtai was born in 1939 in Tel Aviv and grew up there and on Kibbutz Merhavia. The author of over twenty volumes of poetry, he is also the foremost translator of ancient Greek literature into Hebrew, having published over thirty plays in annotated editions, as well as both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Four selections of his work have appeared in English translations by Peter Cole, including “J’accuse” (New Directions, 2003), which received the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation.
Joan Seliger Sidney is the special research associate and writer in residence at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. Her published books include “Body of Diminishing Motion: Poems and a Memoir“ (CavanKerry, 2005). “Soul House,” Seliger Sidney’s translation of Mireille Gansel’s “Maison d’Âme,” was published by World Poetry Books in November 2023. It was long-listed for the Arrowsmith Translation Prize.
Mireille Gansel has won major awards for both her translations of German and Vietnamese poets, and for some of her seven books of poetry. She received the Veu Lliure 2021 Prize from the Catalan PEN. In 2018, Gansel became the Laureate of the Great Prize of Translation Etienne Dolet-Sorbonne Université. Other awards include the Khoury-Ghata Poetry Prize, the Gérald de Nerval Translation Prize, an English PEN Award, and a French Voices Award.