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). The book was the winner of the 2024 International Latino Book Award for Translation—Spanish to English. 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.