In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Nathalie Handal discusses her curatorial approach and her own creative work.
Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, editorial director at the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for September, which is National Translation Month. Nathalie Handal. Nathalie is the author of Volo and Roma Roam. Nathalie, welcome and thank you for joining me today.
Handal: Thank you so much, Mary, for having me.
Poets.org: Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for September, National Translation Month?
Handal: Thank you for inviting me to curate the month of September. I wanted a voyage through the language of the sea, the way people and cultures of the sea translate and trade. The sea, as you know, is a border and a bridge, and I focused on the Mediterranean Sea and the Caribbean Sea, which are my two seas. The sea in this curation is not only oceanic imagery, but also it takes an emotional tone, what is visible and what is submerged. In Mediterranean, Caribbean, and African diasporic traditions, the sea is a site of memory and trauma, from transatlantic crossings to ancestral connections, but also a site of creativity and hybridity and a threshold between human and divine. I also wanted to bring as many new voices to the series as possible.
Poets.org: Now, if you could direct our audience to one poem or more than one poem on Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?
Handal: They all take us to where love dares to go. The place is unnamed, unseen, unrehearsed, unsung.
Poets.org: So, you direct the audience to all of the poems in the archive. [laughs] Perfect. And who or what are you reading right now?
Handal: Giovanni Quessep is a Colombian poet, and I’ve been translating his body of work the last few years. His work helped me dive into the sensual, emotional, philosophical, linguistic meanings of the color blue. So, a very interesting poet. The posthumous poetry collection Ancestrale [Ancestral] by the Sicilian writer Goliarda Sapienza. She’s known for the novel The Art of Joy, which was hailed as a feminist masterpiece. So, discovering these sort of short poems are [sic] really interesting. And Dario Bellezza’s What Sex Is Death?, translated by Peter Covino. Amazing book. I’m also reading the Greek poets Kostis Palamas and Kiki Dimoula. Kiki Dimoula, Cecile Margellos translated The Brazen Plagiarist, published by the Margellos World Republic of Letters, Yale University Press. As you know, Mary, they have extraordinary books in translation. And of course, I always return to Mahmoud Darwish. These days, I’m rereading In the Presence of Absence, translated by Sinan Antoon. And also, one book that has caught my attention is The Years of Blood by the young Nigerian Adedayo Agarau. It’s published by Fordham University Press. I’ve just published some of his poems in the June issue of Guernica magazine, where I’m a poetry editor.
Poets.org: I’d like to circle back to your comment about Quessep and how his work has helped you to rethink the color blue. Tell me more about that. How is his work helping you rethink your conceptualization of the color blue?
Handal: For Quessep, blue is memory and melancholy, mysticism, and myth. His azul is ethereal. To me, blue is not just memory but motion, loss and continuity. But his words also made me ask, what else is blue? Our ache is blue, our world is blue, words are blue, desire is blue. Blue evokes the sky, the sea, the cosmos, all that is vast is ungraspable. Blue is a language, a way of seeing and feeling the world is limitless, which goes back to my poetic philosophy of fusion. Blue is sea that separates and connects. And his work also prompted me to research the different shades of blue and their meaning across cultures, whether it’s emotional or spiritual, symbolic, political, like the blue doors in Morocco or the evil eye amulet of the MENA region, or the indigo in West African cultures and its sacred energy, and so on.
So, and also blue is city, is the city. I see myself in the cross-waves of the city and the sea. And if you remember, if you look at the book Volo, there is this amazing drawing by Molly Crabapple. She asked me how I saw myself, and I told her, and so she drew a woman sort of leisurely leaning on the New York City fire escape with the Mediterranean Sea below. So, sort of the portrait of me. So, yes, that’s been my journey with Quessep.
Poets.org: Very interesting. You know, it seems that, in your work, you’re often trying to open borders through a metaphorical fusion of the city and the sea. You touched on transatlanticism and ancestral crossings earlier. Your approach in your work thematically reminds me of Paul Gilroy’s theory of the Black Atlantic, which is about eschewing concepts of centrism, right, that is Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism, in favor of embracing diaspora and healing rifts. Would you say that this has been your approach in your work? And, if so, aside from Darwish, which other authors have influenced this trajectory of your thinking?
Handal: Thank you, Mary. Thank you so much for engaging with my work with such precision and depth. It’s very generous. I resist fixed notions of identity or belonging. I’m interested in trans-local consciousness. My focus, as you’ve said, it’s not rootedness, but routes, diasporic modernity forged in motion, like across waters, between cultures. Hybridity is not fragmentation but multiplicity. So, my polyphonic, multilingual, multi-sided poetics reflect this creolized aesthetic. And I like the idea of global intimacy. And I draw on global diasporic archives shaped by similar themes of displacement, plurivocality, and transculturalism, all central to Gilroy’s Atlantic, a space of movements and connections. The Black Atlantic is not tied to a single nation or geography, and we live within and against these colonial systems, right? Our poems are the counterculture, the counternarrative. And when we forget, our poems remember.
And Gilroy builds on W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness, right? And last year, I went to Accra, Ghana, to Du Bois’s house, and it was really like a pilgrimage. So, apart from the Darwish, writers that are very important to me is [sic] Édouard Glissant, which taught me where identity is formed in relation, not in isolation. Derek Walcott, who was one of my very first mentors, and I learned from him this polyphonic poetics. Audre Lorde, the personal as political. I mean, her sentence, If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into others’ fantasies of me, is one of the most important sentences I read. Aimé Césaire, founding theorist of Négritude. Through him, I learned to use poetry as a space to reclaim place.
The wonderful June Jordan. She was one of my first supporters of my work and one of the most important sentences to me … what she said, it was very important to me is, “Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth. In the process of telling the truth about what you feel and what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way. Our culture does not encourage us to undertake that attunement.” Amazing, and I feel part of this constellation of thinkers and poets.
Poets.org: And what are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?
Handal: Oh, I’m a nomadic and urban poet, as you know, and cities are some of my favorite poems. And I continue to curate “The City and the Writer” for Words Without Borders. It’s been two decades, almost two decades now. Cities are multiracial and multicultural manuscripts to me. I’m presently working on poems set and inspired by New York City. New York helped me write myself, and I want to export New York City as love poems that are intercultural cross-border meditations. The desire in those poems is sort of an intimate coexistence, right? And my ninth poetry collection, Roma Roam, is forthcoming in 2026, and the city of Rome is the heart of the collection, but the collection explores the role history, religion, art, and culture play in our infidelities. Can we be faithful to all parts of ourselves? Roaming the city, the speaker opens herself to the strangeness of human connection. What happens when it all collides—the past, the present, the city, the lover, truth, and falsity? And maybe this collision is also a way of understanding the world.
And I’m also very excited about this new project that I cocreated with Jen Zoble. We’re both professors at New York University, and as you might know, New York University has thirteen global sites and three degree granting portal campuses. So, this new project is called Transverse, an event series exploring how translation is practiced, performed, theorized, and taught. Our first event was this past February, Under the Same Sun, it’s called, and it was a half-day symposium that brought together poets, critics, editors, translators to explore the recent surge of independent publishers in New York, focusing on Latin American literature. Not only English translation but also in the region’s original languages. So, it has this global scope. So, we’re very excited about that.
Poets.org: So much going on. So much going on, and it’s great. Thank you so much, Nathalie, for joining me today.
Handel: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.