Nicholas Glastonbury is a translator of Turkish and Kurdish literature. His translation of Every Fire You Tend by Sema Kaygusuz was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize by the Society of Authors. He is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center.
John Keene is the author and co-author of a handful of books, including the award-winning collection, Counternarratives, and the forthcoming collection Punks. He received a 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize and a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. His translation projects include poetry, fiction and essays from Portuguese, French and Spanish, among them the Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. His essay, “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness,” featured on the Poetry Foundation’s blog Harriet, has helped to encourage and galvanize translators of Black non-Anglophone writing, and he serves as a member of organizational committee for the African Poetry Book Series, under the auspices of the University of Nebraska’s African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner. He chairs the Department of African American and African Studies and is Distinguished Professor of English and African American Studies at Rutgers University Newark.
This reading is presented as part of the Segue Reading Series.