Words Without Borders invites you to a multilingual reading and celebration of our 2021 Poems in Translation Contest winners, in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. Join us for an evening of translated poetry, read by the winning poets and translators of this year's contest. Winners to be announced. The event will be hosted by our contest judge, poet Airea D. Matthews, 2016 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets and a 2020 Pew Fellow.
In the midst of a pandemic defined by isolation, our third Poems in Translation Contest brought together hundreds of poems, translated from dozens of languages. Of these submissions, contest judge Airea D. Matthews selected two outstanding poems as our winners, to be published in Words Without Borders and in POETS.org’s Poem-a-Day series in September, which is National Translation Month. While we cannot gather in person this year, we look forward to convening virtually with you and our winning translators and poets based around the world to celebrate the power of poetry to bring us together across languages, cultures, and continents.
PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT REQUIRES ADVANCE REGISTRATION. Upon registering, you will be signed up to receive the Zoom link thirty minutes prior to the event’s start time.
There will be closed-captioning for the English-language portion of the event, and an accessibility packet will be available.
Airea D. Matthews is the author of Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets and a 2020 Pew Fellow. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Best American Poets, Harvard Review, American Poet, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, and elsewhere. A past recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College. Matthews is at work on her second collection, mundane gods.