Transnational Literature Series: Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. with Chloe Garcia Roberts

About the event

This event will take place virtually on Zoom. Click the button above to register.

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for a virtual event with translator Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. to discuss and celebrate the release of Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by Forough Farrokhzad. She will be in conversation with poet and translator Chloe Garcia Roberts.

A ravishing new translation of Iran’s trailblazing, feminist poet in an indispensable collection.

In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as iconic and influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a pioneer of modernist Iranian literature and as a leading figure of contemporary world literature. Farrokhzad, as Elizabeth Gray writes in the preface, “remains a beacon to artists, especially women and marginalized artists, who seek freedom in all its forms.”

This thoughtfully curated, deftly translated selection of Farrokhzad’s poems includes work from her whole writing life, early to late. Readers will thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of the quotidian; of longing, loss, and desire; of classical reinvention; of lexical variation and sonic beauty; of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet, translator, and corporate consultant. Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, her translation of modern Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, was published in April 2022 by New Directions. Her poetry collections include Salient and the poetic sequence Series | India. She serves on the Boards of Kimbilio Fiction, Friends of Writers, The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, and Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Moderator Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from the Spanish and Chinese. She is the author of a book of poetry, The Reveal, which was published as part of Noemi Press’s Akrilika Series for innovative Latino writing. Her translations include Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes, which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and a collected poems of Li Shangyin published by the New York Review Books Poets series. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA fellowship in translation.