Shook

Shook (David Shook), a poet, translator, and editor whose work has spanned a wide range of languages and locations, is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma and the University of Oxford.

Shook is the author of the poetry collection Our Obsidian Tongues (Eyewear Publishing, 2013), which was long-listed for the 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 the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. They are the co-translator, with Wendy Call, of Mikeas Sánchez’s How to Be a Good Savage (Milkweed Editions, 2024). Their writing has appeared in Poetry magazine, World Literature Today, and the Guardian, among many other publications, as well as being translated into more than a dozen languages, including Isthmus Zapotec, Kurdish, 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. 

Since founding Phoneme Media, an imprint of Deep Vellum Publishing, in 2013, Shook has edited and published translations from more than thirty-five languages. They currently direct Kashkul Books, a publishing project based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, as well as the translation-focused imprint avión, based at Gato Negro Ediciones in Mexico City.

Shook resides at Newt Beach in Northern California.