David Shook

David Shook is a poet, translator, and editor. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma and the University of Oxford, they are the author of the poetry collection Our Obsidian Tongues (Eyewear Publishing, 2013), which was long-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Shook has also authored numerous chapbooks as well as fifteen book-length translations, including Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Room in Rome, which was a finalist for the National Translation Award and PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

As founder of Phoneme, now an imprint of Deep Vellum Publishing, Shook has edited award-winning books translated from thirty languages, including the first ever book-length translations from Lingala and Uyghur. Shook has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Lannan Resident, the Artist in Residence at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, and a Global Africa Translation Fellow at The Africa Institute. They are based out of Northern California.