Conversation & Reading

Colloquy: Translating the Caribbean

Sat, Apr 29, 2023

4:00 PM–5:30 PM

This event will be in person at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, 107 Suffolk St, New NYC & broadcast live on Montez Press Radio. Register below.

Join us for the fifth installment of Colloquy: Translators in Conversation, with readings and discussion from poets,scholars and translators, Kaiama Glover, Aaron Coleman, and Urayoán Noel on translating the Caribbean. This event will take place in person at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and be broadcast live on Montez Press Radio.

Register here to attend.

Since the fall of 2022, World Poetry Book’s Colloquy event series in collaboration with Montez
Press Radio provides a forum for translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation. Each Colloquy event presents a group of two to four translators of recently published works for short readings and extended conversations moderated by Colloquy’s curator C. Francis Fisher, followed by Q&A’s with the audience. Colloquy events are simultaneously broadcast on internet radio for broader access by our collaborators at Montez Press Radio.

READER BIOS

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has written extensively about Caribbean literature, gender, and postcoloniality in such works as A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, and she is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction and francophone non-fiction, including Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst, Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano, René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams, Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, and Feminism, and Maboula Soumahoro’s Black is the Journey, Africana the Name. Her current projects include an intellectual biography titled, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life” and a translation of Yanick Lahens’s Douces déroutes. She is also at work on a documentary titled, “Black Diva Saves the World.” Her scholarly and translation work has been supported by fellowships at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and is the co-host of WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean.

Aaron Coleman is a poet, translator, and scholar of the African diaspora. He is currently the Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) winner of the GLCA New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Prize. Aaron’s poems and essays have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Callaloo, The New York Times, the Poetry Society of America, Translation Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. William Fulbright Program, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. He is currently translating AfroCuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s 1967 book, El gran zoo [The Great Zoo], and Aaron’s next poetry collection, Red Wilderness, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2024.

Urayoán Noel is a 2022 Letras Boricuas fellow and the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Transversal (University of Arizona Press, 2021), a New York Public Library Book of the Year. Other books include the LASA award-winning critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), and, as translator, adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022) and Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha (Shearman Books, 2018), a National Translation Award finalist also longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. A resident of the Bronx, Noel teaches at New York University and at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas and is a translator for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/The Puerto Rican Literature Project (PLPR).

This event is organized and co-sponsored by World Poetry Books, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, Montez Press Radio, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center.