Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with poets Sylvie Kandé and Danielle Legros Georges to discuss and celebrate their work, including their new collections The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore and Island Heart, among others.

Sylvie Kandé’s neo-epic in three cantos, The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, is a double narrative combining today’s tales of African migration to Europe on the one hand, with the legend of Abubakar II, on the other: Abubakar, emperor of 14th-Century Mali, sailed West toward the new world, never to return. Kandé’s language deftly weaves a dialogue between these two narratives and between the epic traditions of the globe. Dazzling in its scope, the poem swings between epic stylization, griot storytelling, and colloquial banter, capturing an astonishing range of human experience. Kandé makes of the migrant a new hero, a future hero whose destiny has not yet taken shape, whose stories are still waiting to be told in their fullness and grandeur: the neverending quest has only just begun.

Sylvie Kandé is the author of three collections of poetry published by Gallimard. Lagon, lagunes. Tableau de Mémoire (2000) was postfaced by Edouard Glissant, while La quête infinie de l’autre rive : épopée en trois chants (2011), short-listed for the Prix Mahogany and the Prix des Découvreurs, received the 2017 Prix Lucienne Gracia-Vincent. It is now published in German by Matthes & Seitz, and in English in 2022 as The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three Cantos, translated by Alexander Dickow, and published by Wesleyan University Press. Gestuaire (2016), short-listed for the Prix Ethiophile and the Prix Kowalski des lycéens, received the 2017 Prix Louise Labé. It will soon be anthologized in a German/French edition. As an historian, she specializes in the complex conversations between Africa and Europe, Africa and its Diasporas, notably the issue of métissage/ hybridity. She is the 2022 recipient of the Tyler Stovall Mission Prize granted by the Western Society for French History. A member of PEN America and the association of the Lycée Louis-le-grand alumni, she teaches at SUNY Old Westbury in the History & Philosophy Department.

Ida Faubert is a 20th-century Haitian-French poet considered a Caribbean—and especially Haitian—literary foremother.  Island Heart, the first English-language volume of Faubert’s, in a stunning translation by Danielle Legros Georges, makes her work more widely accessible to students, scholars, and readers of Latin-American, African-diasporic, Caribbean, and Haitian letters; and more generally available to readers of poetry and the poetry of women. Born in Port-au-Prince and reared in Paris, Faubert neither easily fit socially-prescribed categories for women of color in France or Haiti, nor conformed to them—living and burning through France’s Belle Époque, world wars, and Haiti’s Indigenist revolt in art. Bicultural, biracial, privileged, and complex, Faubert was a deft writer and socialite who promoted and participated in the movements of Haitian writers and literature in Haiti and France. While her work is garnering growing critical attention, she is seen as one of Haiti’s great women poets.

Danielle Legros Georges is a creative and critical writer, translator, and academic whose work sits in the fields of contemporary U.S. poetry, Black and African-diasporic poetry and literature, Caribbean/Latin American and Haitian studies, and literary translation. She is the author of several books of poetry The Dear Remote Nearness of You (2016)and Island Heart (2021) translations of the poems of 20th-century Haitian-French poet Ida Faubert. Her poems have been widely published, anthologized, and included in artistic commissions and collaborations. Legros Georges is the former Poet Laureate of Boston; the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for explorations of Caribbean literature; and a professor of creative writing at Lesley University.

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Join Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance for a virtual event on transformative migrations in the digital age with Saïd Khatibi and Amara Lakhous. They will be in conversation with Alexander Elinson. 

Saïd Khatibi is a novelist, travel writer, translator, and cultural journalist, born in 1984 in Bou Saâda, Algeria. He writes in Arabic and French and translates between both. He has a BA in French Literature from the University of Algiers and an MA in Cultural Studies from the Sorbonne. Sarajevo Firewood is his third novel in Arabic (and first in English translation), and was shortlisted for the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His other novels are Kitab al-Khataya (Book of Errors), Editions ANEP, 2013, and Forty Years Waiting for Isabelle, 2016, about the real-life Swiss traveler Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), for which he won the 2017 Katara Award for the Novel. He has a travel book about the Balkans, The Inflamed Gardens of the East, 2015, and has written extensively on raï music, including a book (Wedding Fire, 2010) that tells its story. He lives in Slovenia.

Amara Lakhous was born in Algeria in 1970. He moved to Italy in 1995. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of Algiers and another in Humanities from the University of Rome, La Sapienza where he completed a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Living Islam as a Minority.” He is the author of five novels, three of which were written in both Arabic and Italian. His best known works are the much acclaimed Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2008), Divorce Islamic Style (2012), A Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet (2014), and The Prank of the Good Little Virgin in Via Ormea (2016). His latest novel in Arabic, Tir al-lil (The Night Bird), was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, 2021. His novels have been translated from Italian into many languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Danish and Persian. Lakhous has been awarded, among others, the Flaiano Prize in Italy in 2006 and the Algerians Booksellers Prize in 2008. Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio has been adapted into a movie by the Italian director Isotta Toso in 2010 and many theater productions. It was chosen for the 2014 New Student Reading Project at Cornell University. Lakhous moved to New York City in August of 2014 and is currently teaching in the Italian Department of New York University.

Alexander Elinson is Associate Professor of Arabic and Head of the Arabic Program Hunter College of the City University of New York. He received his M.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle (1998) and his Ph.D. from Columbia University (2004). In addition to his book Looking back at al-Andalus: the poetics of loss and nostalgia in medieval Arabic and Hebrew Literature, he has written extensively on classical Arabic and Hebrew poetry and prose, as well as on contemporary language politics and ideology, prison narratives, and oral and written culture in Morocco. He has translated two novels by Youssef Fadel: A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me and A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me, the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. He has also translated Hot Maroc by Yassin Adnan. His translation of Khadija Marouazi’s prison novel History of Ash will be published in 2023. He is currently translating Amara Lakhous’s latest novel, The Night Bird.

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Half of the world’s 26 million refugees are children. Their formal education is disrupted, and their lives are too often dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about what the future holds. Even kids who have the opportunity to attend school face enormous challenges, as they struggle to integrate into unfamiliar societies and educational environments.

In Right Where We Belong, Sarah Dryden-Peterson discovers that, where governments and international agencies have been stymied, refugee teachers and students themselves are leading. From open-air classrooms in Uganda to the hallways of high schools in Maine, new visions for refugee education are emerging. Dryden-Peterson introduces us to people like Jacques—a teacher who created a school for his fellow Congolese refugees in defiance of local laws—and Hassan, a Somali refugee navigating the social world of the American teenager. Drawing on more than 600 interviews in twenty-three countries, Dryden-Peterson shows how teachers and students are experimenting with flexible forms of learning. Rather than adopt the unrealistic notion that all will soon return to “normal,” these schools embrace unfamiliarity, develop students’ adaptiveness, and demonstrate how children, teachers, and community members can build supportive relationships across lines of difference.

It turns out that policymakers, activists, and educators have a lot to learn from displaced children and teachers. Their stories point the way to better futures for refugee students and inspire us to reimagine education broadly, so that children everywhere are better prepared to thrive in a diverse and unpredictable world.

Sarah Dryden-Peterson is Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the founder and director of Refugee REACH, which promotes research, education, and action for refugees. In addition to her university teaching, she has taught in primary and secondary schools in the United States, South Africa, and Madagascar.

Zuhra Faizi is a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the Refugee REACH Initiative at Harvard. Her research focuses on community-based education in settings of conflict and displacement with a focus on Afghanistan. She seeks to highlight culturally-informed and sustainable educational opportunities for marginalized children. Dr. Faizi has a doctorate in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Cristina Aguilera Sandoval brings 18 years of experience in social movements, immigrant integration, and advocacy. Raised in Venezuela, she spent the last decade leading and inspiring others to take social and political action, building coalitions to impact social change, and developing strategies to advance social justice. She currently directs the Programs Team at the Rian Immigrant Center. Previously, Cristina worked for six years at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA), where she rose to become Director of Organizing.

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August is Women in Translation Month! Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, and Third Place Books in Seattle for a virtual event with translator Katie Whittemore to celebrate the premier of Open Letter’s Translator Triptych series. She will be in conversation with writers Mark Haber, Lynn Steger Strong, and Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi. ​

This summer Open Letter Books launched a new program designed to honor and empower literary translators by emphasizing their role in the discovery, curation, and promotion of international literature. Starting from the idea of the “translator as curator,” every year a different renowned literary translator will select three titles to be published in the same month by Open Letter Books and promoted as an intellectual bundle. This year’s triptych curated by Katie Whittemore features works by three important, contemporary women writers from Spain: Wolfskin by Lara Moreno, Mothers Don’t by Katixa Agirre, and Bad Handwriting by Sara Mesa.

Sofía is thirty-five and her husband has left her. Her father died the year before, and her mother is living in the Canary Islands with a new partner. Sofía flees the city with her young son, seeking refuge in her father’s house on the southern coast of Spain, where she spent summers as a girl. Her younger sister, with whom she has a close but uneasy relationship, joins her. Living together again, the sisters face their present as well as their childhood and tangled past. Wolfskin is an intimate meditation on ambivalence and motherhood, eroticism and disappointment, family violence and failure, and ultimately, the possibility—or impossibility—of living with those you love.

Mothers don’t write. Mothers give life. How could a woman be capable of neglecting her children? How could she kill them? Is motherhood a prison? Complete with elements of a traditional thriller, this a groundbreaking novel in which the chronicle and the essay converge. Katixa Agirre reflects on the relationship between motherhood and creativity, in dialogue with writers such as Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing. Mothers Don’t plumbs the depths of childhood and the lack of protection children face before the law. The result is a disturbing, original novel in which the author does not offer answers, but plants contradictions and discoveries.

From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four and Among the Hedges comes a collection of unsettling, captivating stories. The eleven stories in Bad Handwriting approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom. There are children who resist authority and experience the process of growing up with shock, and loneliness; alienated young girls whose rebellion lies under the surface—subterranean, furious and impotent; people who are tormented—or not—by regret and doubt; lives that hide crimes—both real and imagined. Eschewing cosmopolitanism in favor of the micro-world of her characters, Mesa depicts a reality that is messy and disturbing, on even the smallest scale of an individual life, a single family.

Katie Whittemore translates from the Spanish. Full-length translations include works by Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durán, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, and Katixa Agirre. Forthcoming translations include novels by Mesa, Serena, Jon Bilbao, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Almudena Sánchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adón. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 to translate Moreno’s In Case We Lose Power.

Mark Haber is the author of the 2008 story collection Deathbed Conversions and the novel Reinhardt’s Garden, longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, was published in 2022. He is the operations manager at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. His nonfiction has appeared in the Rumpus, Music & Literature, and LitHub. His fiction has appeared in Southwest Review and Air/Light.

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, Time, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at The Pratt Institute, Fairfield University, Catapult, and Columbia University and will be the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College for the 2022-2023 school year. She was born and raised in South Florida.

Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novels Savage Tongues and Call Me Zebra which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, was long listed for the PEN Open Book Award, A Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller and named a Best Book by over twenty publications. It has been translated into Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish and Romanian. She received a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award and was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree for her debut novel, Fra Keeler. Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Fellowship from Art OMI and has appeared in The Paris Review, GRANTA, Guernica, BOMB,  and the Los Angeles Review of Books among others.  She is Iranian-American and has lived in Catalonia, Italy, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

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Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith and The Japan Society of Boston for an in-person event with internationally best-selling novelist Mieko Kawakami to discuss and celebrate the release of her new book All the Lovers in the Night. She will be in conversation with translator and scholar Anna Zielinska-Elliott.

Bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami invites readers back into her immediately recognizable fictional world with this new, extraordinary novel—brilliantly translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd—and demonstrates yet again why she is one of today’s most uncategorizable, insightful, and talented novelists.

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyuko stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.

As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface, and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh and cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it.

Mieko Kawakami is the author of the internationally best-selling novel  Breasts and Eggs, a  New York Times  Notable Book of the Year and one of  TIME’s Best 10 Books of 2020; and the highly acclaimed  Heaven, her second novel to be translated and published in English, which  Oprah Daily described as written “with jagged, visceral beauty.” Born in Osaka, Japan, Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet in 2006, and in 2007 published her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World. Known for their poetic qualities, their insights into the female body, and their preoccupation with ethics and modern society, her books have been translated into over twenty languages. Kawakami’s literary awards include the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. She lives in Tokyo, Japan.

Sam Bett has translated fiction by Yoko Ogawa, Yukio Mishima, and NisiOisin. He also co-hosts Us&Them, a Brooklyn-based reading series showcasing the work of writers who translate. David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated novels and stories by Hiroko Oyamada, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. Sam Bett and David Boyd are the translators of Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night,Heaven, and Breasts and Eggs.

Moderator Anna Zielinska-Elliott is a translator of modern Japanese literature into Polish. Best known for her translations of Haruki Murakami, she has also translated Mishima Yukio, Yoshimoto Banana, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, and Mizumura Minae. She is the author of a Polish-language monograph on gender in Murakami, a literary guidebook to Murakami’s Tokyo, and several articles on European translation practices relating to contemporary Japanese fiction. Zielinska-Elliott teaches Japanese language, literature, and translation studies at Boston University and is Director of the MFA Program in Literary Translation.

About our event partner

The Japan Society of Boston, Inc, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to promote cultural and economic ties and active interchange between Japanese and Americans for mutual understanding, benefit, and enjoyment. They serve as a programming nexus for a network of individuals, institutions, and businesses that are linked together by a strong interest in Japan and a shared recognition of the importance of the U.S.-Japan relationship.

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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.

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