Roger Sedarat

Roger Sedarat is an Iranian American poet, scholar, and translator. A recipient of the Willis Barnstone Prize in Translation, his works include the translated poetry collection These Garden Nights: Ghazals of Hafez, which is forthcoming, and the academic study Nature and Nostalgia in the Poetry of Nader Naderpour (Cambria Press, 2017), cowritten with Rouhollah Zarei. Sedarat’s most recent academic work, Emerson in Iran: the American Appropriation of Persian Poetry (State University of New York Press, 2019), is the first full-length study of the American poet-philosopher’s engagement with the verse tradition of Iran. 

In addition to publishing on the page, Sedarat brings both translation and creative writing into interdisciplinary performance. His series Elemental Translation, which experiments with rendering foreign verse into English through classical elements, includes the burning of a source text followed by its re-transcription in the target language with its ashes, in an attempt to capture something of what Walter Benjamin terms the “afterlife” of translation. Haji as Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque (Word Works, 2017), Sedarat’s poetry collection that challenges the Orientalist gaze toward the Middle East, was adapted into a staged production at the Brooklyn Music School with the support of Atlantic Philanthropies. 

Sedarat teaches literary translation, poetry, and cross-genre creative writing in performance in the MFA program at Queens College, City University of New York.