Gregory Pardlo’s poetry collection Spectral Evidence is available today from Knopf, so we asked him a few questions about his readers, when he writes, and his favorite book to recommend to others.

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Who do you most wish would read your book? (your boss, your childhood bully, etc.)

Maybe someone in the NYC Parks Dept. will pick up my book and stumble across the little tricked-out villanelle about the Lafayette monument in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. The monument features Lafayette, his horse, and an unnamed black man whom many believe to be James Armistead Lafayette, a hero of the Revolutionary War.

It’s been a few years since I visited that monument. Maybe the omission has been corrected already, but it is painful to imagine the good people of Brooklyn trooping past the image of the rightly-celebrated Marquise de Lafayette and this other guy, unidentified and random as a lawn jockey, holding the reins of Lafayette’s horse.

It’s bad enough that wealthy people in early America, when commissioning portraits of themselves and their families, liked to include anonymized black people as testaments to their wealth and power. It’s troubling to think that a public memorial would be allowed to do that today—with a Revolutionary War hero, no less. Maybe someone in the Parks Dept. will agree and affix a plaque to Lafayette’s monument elaborating this history.

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What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

The First Amendment, cancel culture, fascism, academic freedom, Palestine, COINTELPRO, structural racism, environmental justice, Sudan, reparations, reproductive rights, meritocracy, fragility, the NYC public school system, evangelicals, Cuba, Drag Queen Story Hour, and, you know, that other thing.

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Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?

I could not imagine my life without tennis. I’m constantly amazed at how well I can imagine myself playing, and how well my subconscious mind thwarts that execution. That all of this gets worked out in the presence of someone else who is caught up in the very same internal conflict—this is what makes tennis sublime.

Ultimately, tennis is theory of mind. The ball is a projection of our vain attempts to escape the subconscious, to get outside our heads. The ball materializes as a thing in itself only where its location is most disputed—it’s on the line! It’s outside the box! Otherwise, the ball is little more than a metronomic backbeat punctuating the players’ struggles to capture their equally elusive sense of being.

Sometimes, I find myself watching grainy old footage of famous matches on my laptop where the ball itself is barely visible. The players look like two cats chasing a laser dot aimed by their opponent. But it doesn’t deter me. The dance is the thing.

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What is your favorite way to procrastinate when you are meant to be writing?

I write an inordinate number of blurbs and letters of recommendation. I serve on countless juries, committees and advisory boards. I tell myself that silently martyring myself to the advocacy of others is a calling more noble than making my own work. The truth is, this “giving back” is less altruism than it is a way of managing guilt for good fortune I’m not so sure I deserve.

If our paths cross, dear reader, I may offer to perform some service for you. Even if it is to read your uncle’s memoir or write limericks with your kid’s third grade class during their poetry unit, please do not enable this weak old man by accepting.

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If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

If I had another career left in me, I’d be an architect. As a kid, I liked to draw my dream houses. The houses always had a stream or some internal waterway allowing inhabitants to swim or tube or kayak from one part of the house to another. In true mid century fashion, naturally, my houses were all split-level, and they often had a slide or Batman pole in addition to elevators that would serpentine their way to different elevations. There were stairs, too, in case of a fire emergency.

In first grade, I had a pet hamster named Maximillian. Max I & Max II. He was one hamster who inhabited two bodies. When Max’s first host-body died, my parents reincarnated him in another hamster body. Anyway, along with Max, came my passion for Habitrail units. I wanted Max to be able to explore the most stimulating environments. Contained if not pseudo-freedom. The result was a kind of domestic sprawl that I only now realize made a deep impression on my aesthetic sensibility.

The dream houses I later drew were distinguished less by the quality of habitation they inspired, and more by the ease of circulation they facilitated. I think this interest turns up again in my penchant for the discursive long poem. It might be why Whitman and Campbell McGrath’s long poems, for example, made such an impression on me. I still dream of being an architect. My next book might be architecture-themed.

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Spectral Evidence by Gregory Pardlo is available via Knopf.

Today, the National Book Critics Circle announced its 30 finalists for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Awards, which celebrate the best books of the year in six categories: autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, general nonfiction, and poetry. The finalists for the John Leonard Prize for best first book and the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize were also announced.

The NBCC Service Award was awarded to Marion Winik, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing was awarded to Becca Rothfeld. The recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award is Judy Blume, and the recipient of the Toni Morrison Achievement Award is the American Library Association.

“This year’s remarkable and uncompromising finalists delve into subjects as diverse as adoption, authorial identity, cultural disruption, mythmaking, and the banal,” said NBCC President Heather Scott Partington, in a press release. “Many tell stories that have previously been silenced or ignored. Our Sandrof Life Achievement Award and Morrison Achievement Award winners Judy Blume and the ALA exemplify how literacy and literary access lead to liberation. What a beautiful year for books.”

The 2023 awards will be presented on March 21, 2024 at the New School in New York City. Until then, here are the finalists:

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Susan Ito, I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir (The Ohio State University Press)

David Mas Masumoto, with artwork by Patricia Wakida, Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm (Red Hen Press)

Ahmed Naji, Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison, translated by Katharine Halls (McSweeney’s)

Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster)

Matthew Zapruder, Story of a Poem: A Memoir (Unnamed Press)

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BIOGRAPHY

Jonathan Eig, King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Gregg Hecimovich, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of the Bondwoman’s Narrative (Ecco)

Yunte Huang, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History (Liveright)

Rachel Shteir, Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disruptor (Yale University Press)

Jonny Steinberg, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (Knopf)

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CRITICISM

Nicholas Dames, The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press)

Myriam Gurba, Creep: Accusations and Confessions (Avid Reader Press)

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Grace E. Lavery, Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton University Press)

Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press)

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FICTION

Teju Cole, Tremor (Random House)

Daniel Mason, North Woods (Random House)

Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home (Knopf)

Marie NDiaye, Vengeance Is Mine, translated by Jordan Stump (Knopf)

Justin Torres, Blackouts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

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NONFICTION

Roxanna Asgarian, We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs (Knopf)

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (W. W. Norton)

Dina Nayeri, Who Gets Believed? When the Truth Isn’t Enough (Catapult Books)

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POETRY

Saskia Hamilton, All Souls (Graywolf Press)

Kim Hyesoon, Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi (New Directions)

Romeo Oriogun, The Gathering of Bastards (University of Nebraska Press)

Robyn Schiff, Information Desk (Penguin Books)

Charif Shanahan, Trace Evidence (Tin House)

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GREGG BARRIOS BOOK IN TRANSLATION PRIZE

Kareem Abdulrahman’s translation of The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali (Archipelago Books)

Natascha Bruce’s translation of Owlish by Dorothy Tse (Graywolf Press)

Don Mee Choi’s translation of Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon (New Directions)

Todd Fredson’s translation of Zakwato & Loglêdou’s Peril by Azo Vauguy (Action Books)

Maureen Freely’s translation of Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü (Transit Books)

Tiffany Tsao’s translation of Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu (Feminist Press)

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JOHN LEONARD PRIZE

Ariana Benson, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press)

Emilie Boone, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography (Duke University Press)

Victor Heringer, The Love of Singular Men, translated by James Young (New Directions)

Tahir Hamut Izgil, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: a Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide, translated by Joshua L. Freeman (Penguin Press)

Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King (One World)

Martin J. Siegel, Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs (Cornell University Press)

Megan Hunter’s 2018 novel, The End We Start From, has been adapted for the screen by director Mahalia Belo and stars Jodie Comer. We asked Hunter about the experience.

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How does it feel to see your characters come to life on screen?

It’s an experience that’s very hard to describe; there’s something genuinely life changing about seeing aspects of your imagination take physical form in that way. When I walked onto the set of the flooded flat (which was a real house) I cried—it was somehow exactly as I’d imagined it, down to the water marks on the walls.

There was a real shift in my experience from that moment on, the whole process having an emotional force I was unprepared for, a kind of reliving not only of my experience of writing but of aspects of my own life. Then when I first saw the film I again realized some of its images were just as I saw them when as I was writing; there was something haunting in this, like an echo of a memory filtered through fiction and then the lens of a camera years later.

For all this talk of recognition it is so important to say that the film is something completely new—a work of art in its own right—so beautifully directed by Mahalia Belo, brilliantly written by Alice Birch, and with stunning performances by Jodie Comer and many others. I feel extremely lucky to have had my work adapted—and transformed—by such a dream team of visionary people. I am aware that it’s quite unusual to feel such faith that an adaptation will retain the spirit of the book, but I always did. So each glimpse—and then each viewing of the film—has been a confirmation of this.

But then I also love the parts where the film diverges from the book and adds something new and unexpected. There’s this whole section towards the end which expresses something visually about a woman (and baby) in nature that the book couldn’t have done. There is a scale and beauty there that is unique to the film. I loved seeing that: it felt like something I hadn’t seen before on screen and that it was exciting entirely in its own right, cinematically.

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What’s the best part of having your work adapted for film? 

I think it’s that sense of the work opening out—in new directions, to new people, having your story re-imagined and then worked on in so many different ways—by another writer initially and then by casting, costume, set design, cinematography and so on. There is something magical and thrilling about this in its breadth and opportunity.

When I visited the set I was astonished to see, in person, just how much work goes into every single element, and by so many different teams of people. The collaboration is happening through the work itself, seeing your work become part of someone else’s work, witnessing people finding their own meanings and perspectives within the story.

This process has also helped to awaken my own interest in adaptation and in writing for screen—I’m currently adapting my second novel, The Harpy, for television and also working on other screen projects, and have discovered a real love of this form of writing and collaboration.

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What’s your favorite book to movie adaptation (other than your own)?

I am partial to The Price of Salt/Carol—I read the book first, swiftly followed by the film, and the two are somehow joined in my mind while still remaining distinct in their own identities. There is a dialogue between the forms, a way that the film manages to express the book’s essence visually, and most of all a subtle emotional potency (particularly in the final scene!) that can be read between the two: it’s as though you can look at them simultaneously, without discord or contradiction, or (as in the case of lesser adaptations), that awful sense of something falling short, being unable to capture the original. It’s a failure to achieve its own life, I think, this sense, to literally live up to its source material. But Carol does create its own reality, while holding the heart of the book close.

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What notes or pieces of inspiration for the story/characters did you share with the creators?

I met with Alice Birch before she wrote the script—I’m a huge admirer of hers—and one of the things we discussed was names; in the book everyone is known by their initials, and the narrator is nameless. Alice asked me how I felt about this in relation to an adaptation, and we discussed its importance in giving the book a certain universal, but also mysterious and perhaps even timeless quality.

This was kept in the script and the film, as well as the book’s emphasis on the name of the baby: Zeb. He is the only one with a name, and it’s wonderful to see how many babies played “Zeb” in the movie! I also loved seeing the credits roll and the long list of initials at the end. It felt playful but also fitting, just as I hope it does in the book.

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How was your relationship with the book changed during the process of adaptation?

There is a sense in which the work becomes less personal to me, in this form, and I welcomed that—it was interesting to have another stage in the publishing process, from the intense attachment of the writing of the book, to publication when there is a loss, in some sense, of the book to the world, and then this rare opportunity for another stage, when the book becomes something else, when there is a metamorphosis into an entirely new form.

I am always wary of the book/parenthood analogy but I can see something here in the process of letting go, seeing something become independent from you but always with that origin, that root in your creation. There is also something personal in this for me as the book has ‘grown up’ alongside my children—they were 3 and 6 when I wrote the book and will be 11 and 14 when the film comes out…

Today, Chicago-based arts organization United States Artists announced their 50 2024 USA Fellows, a group that includes six Writing Fellows, each of whom will receive an unrestricted cash award of $50,000, intended to allow each writer “to deepen their respective practices and devote themselves rigorously to the art of writing.”

Here are the 2024 USA Writing Fellows, along with their bios:

Dantiel W. Moniz

Dantiel W. Moniz is the recipient of a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, and fellowships from Yaddo, Lighthouse Works, MacDowell, among others. Moniz’s debut collection, Milk Blood Heat was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and The Story Prize. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, American Short Fiction, Tin House, and elsewhere. Moniz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she teaches fiction.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and The Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Thompson-Spires’ collection was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award, and several other prizes including an NAACP Image Award. She is also the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award.

She earned a doctorate in English from ­­­­Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from ­­­­­­the University of Illinois. With dark humor and covering topics from identity to chronic illness, her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The Cut, The Root, The White Review, Ploughshares, 400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619–2019, The 1619 Project, among other publications. In addition to a novel under contract with Scribner, she has new writing forthcoming in Fourteen Days: A Community Gathering, edited by Margaret Atwood.

Thompson–Spires is currently the Richards Family Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Cornell University, teaching both in the MFA and undergraduate programs.

Farid Matuk

Born in Lima, Peru to a Peruvian father and Syrian mother, and preemptively kidnapped to escape his father’s violence, Farid Matuk has lived in the US since the age of six as an undocumented person, then a “legal” resident, and eventually as a “naturalized” citizen. Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. Their poems have appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, The Paris Review, and Poetry, among others. Matuk’s work has been supported with residencies and grants from the Headlands Center for the Arts and with a Holloway Visiting Professorship at UC Berkeley. Redolent, their book-arts collaboration with artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, won the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Matuk’s translation of Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness is forthcoming in 2024 from Graywolf Press.

Jeffery U. Darensbourg

Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana of Creole and Indigenous ancestry, Jeffery Darensbourg’s work explores culture and language in the lives of mixed-ethnicity people in Louisiana and the ways in which various categories, attitudes, and histories regionally intersect with his own life. He has published essays, zines, and poems and has had a play produced. He is known for his lecture performances and also as a regular guest on broadcasts and podcasts. He holds a PhD in cognitive science and is an advocate for Indigenous languages, especially Ishakkoy, and Indigenous place names, especially the original name for where he lives, Bulbancha (known to many as New Orleans). His recent work has focused on family trauma, mental illness, and the experience of passing (much of the time) for white. Darensbourg is an enrolled member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Indians and a Fellow of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Monica Ong

Monica Ong is the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press). Ong’s work has been published in Poetry, Scientific American, The Asian American Literary Review, and is forthcoming in the anthology The Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid Lit Collection (Fonograf Editions). A Kundiman Poetry Fellow and graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong’s visual poetry innovates on text+image to surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Planetaria, her recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poems was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation (2022) and the Hunterdon Art Museum (2023). In 2021, Ong founded Proxima Vera, a micropress specializing in fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects, many of which have been acquired by institutional collections and museums worldwide.

Danielle Evans

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Evans’ first collection won the PEN America Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction. Her second won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and was a finalist for the Aspen Prize, The Story Prize, The Chautauqua Prize, and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. She has been awarded the New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and was selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s annual 5 under 35. Evans’ stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Best American Short Stories. She is an Associate Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Dictums about the impossibility of translating poetry abound, from Frost’s oft-misquoted aphorism that poetry is what’s lost in translation to John Ciardi’s oft-misattributed statement that translation is the art of failure. But perhaps the two of us met young enough and with sufficient naïve optimism—spurred on by our mutual mentor Adam Zagajewski who introduced us in 2004—to take on the impossible. Soon I started translating Tomasz’s poetry.

Tomasz’s book-length epic poem Twelve Stations had just come out to wide critical acclaim, followed quickly by his translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice and then his sixth book of poetry, Colonies, establishing him as a preeminent Polish poet attuned to the difficulty of finding an authentic self in a region marked by the dislocations of war. Still, it took a number of years to secure an American press willing to gamble on an unknown poet from what’s referred to as a minor language.

In 2007, Zephyr Press published Tomasz’s English-language debut, The Forgotten Keys, a selection of his poems from across his five collections to date in my translation. Meanwhile, after a fair bit of handwringing about what it might mean to be publishing a translation before my own book of poetry, my first collection, The Local World, won the Wick Poetry Prize and appeared in 2011.

As is inevitable with poetic debuts—whether in the original or in translation—these books brought a sense of accomplishment but also raised questions about what we would do differently and where we were each headed as poets. We debriefed. We discussed the importance of travel as a theme in both of our work. We pondered the difficulty of rendering meter and rhyme in translation.

And eventually I decided to work on Colonies in its entirety, fueled in part by a desire to find a more accurate equivalent to the music of Tomasz’s style and represent the interlinked quality of his concatenated, book-length series. That this quality corresponded to an innate sharpening of sonic texture in my own writing, born out in my next collection, Territorial, only added to the appeal of continuing to collaborate.

Embedded in this process of moving between writing and translating is also a process of finding influence outside our own literary traditions. Both of us have come to appreciate it as one of the best ways to understand the strengths and weaknesses of our specific languages, i.e., what artistic tools we have at our disposal, and to push the boundaries of our specific cultures, i.e., what literary conventions define and confine us.

If there’s one thing this process has taught us, it’s that poetry in general is an art of the impossible, of distilling an experience down to a few words on a page that mean multiple things at once. As Charles Simic put it, little is said but much is meant in a lyric poem. Or, to give Frost’s aphorism correctly: “I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.” In his essay “Star Vehicle: On Translating Poetry” in the LA Review of Books, Tomasz points out that if we’ve been told anything by this definition, it’s what poetry is not—but still we have no idea what it is.

Yet we both recognize when it shows up, in an experience perhaps the flip side of Frost’s idea, as the inscrutable feeling: how would I even begin to say that in my language? And then, despite ourselves, we find we are translating.

That was the case with Tomasz’s eighth volume, To the Letter, just out in my translation from Archipelago Books. And that goes for the writing of it in English as well as in the original Polish, as we explain in the following reflections. It’s a book that echoes other writers, layers quotation, and translates in all sorts of ways to affirm connection in the face of twenty-first-century isolation. Bringing it into English during the literal isolation of the pandemic was an important affirmation at the time, just as our friendship/collaboration over the past two decades has been an important reminder of the centrality of translation in our own creative lives.
–Mira Rosenthal

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Creative Influence

One of the most common questions Mira fields at events is: “How does the poetry you translate influence your own writing?” And people often ask Tomasz about whether the process of being translated changes the way he writes. We remain very different poets stylistically and thematically. We also remain inevitably changed by the experience of our collaboration. Working together over these last two decades has brought into focus distinguishing features of our predilections as writers—the personality quirks that good friends recognize—while also highlighting the line between writing and translating.

Mira Rosenthal: I never quite know how to answer the question of the influence between what I translate and my own writing. Is it different from the influence of other things I read? After all, translation is an act of reading, very close reading, the closest reading you can ever do. Above all, it teaches you about language, the building blocks of the whole endeavor, but in a more acute way, from the outside.

Only by seeing what’s possible in Polish do I realize what is and isn’t possible in English, how language determines our categories of emotion and our patterns of thought. Translating has made me more sensitive to those categories and patterns in English, and more and more as a poet I find myself interested in playing around with them, in using writing as a way to expose them.

I think that’s one thing Tomasz and I have in common: an interest in patterns and dynamics—whether linguistic or cultural—that keep repeating and morphing across generations. And the use of rhythm and rhyme is an important stylistic expression of that for both of us.

Tomasz Różycki: A major problem in the translation of contemporary poetry, to my mind, is that very few translators want (and are able) to translate metrically and musically organized poetry. If you look at which Polish poetry has been most successful in English (or whatever other translation) it’s usually an unrhymed, intellectual game or reflection.

But in the Polish tradition, we have a ton of great rhymed poems by beloved Polish poets who are completely unknown in English. In that whole circle of translators, Mira is a wonderful and precious treasure: she keeps the rhythm and the rhyme. And I’m so grateful!

If I wanted to write poetry especially to be translated, especially easy for foreign readers, the first thing I would do is to kick out all the rhyme and meter. That would help a lot. But instead, over time, I’ve observed an opposite trend in my writing: the metrical challenges have grown exponentially, accumulating even more difficulties for my translators.

MR: Sometimes editors have balked a bit at the rhyme in my translations. My sense is that some readers experience rhyme as an impediment to lyricism that makes it sound unnatural. The challenge is to make it sound fluid instead of forced. But I’m also aware of the fact that I’m “allowed” to do things in my own poems that I can’t do in a translation. Maybe I want a moment in one of my poems to sound clunky or prosaic. Or I might have a flourish of rhymes only at certain moments or choose purposefully strange diction that’s halting and uneasy.

If I do these same things in a translation, it’s often considered a bad rendering that isn’t “fluent,” even if the same qualities are there in the original. When translating, strangeness and experimentation get supplanted to a degree by one of two concerns: the necessity of constructing an interpretation of the poem, and the prevalent though erroneous expectation of fluency.

TR: I’m not as experienced a translator as Mira, and it’s not my main commitment. But it seems to me that each endeavor has a discrete mission: a translator is a kind of teacher, and a poet is much more private. A translator might use language that is simpler (in the sense of being the pedagogue), while a poet’s language embraces sophistication.

For example, when I translated “Un coup de dés” by Mallarmé, every now and then I had to make very specific linguistic and grammatical decisions where the text did not give me any hint of how to interpret it; on the contrary, it was maximally open and demonstrated its ambiguity. Meanwhile, every choice of the translator means interpretation, so it closes the “openness” of the poem.

I’ve also been translating more and more Ukrainian poetry lately in connection to the war with Russia. This seems to me a more authentic way to convey what’s happening, to give voice to the Ukrainian experience. I also treat it as a kind of mission – this is what I can do for them in this difficult time, this is how I can support their heroic struggle—by showing what great poetry they have, how rich and beautiful Ukrainian culture is. In this sense, I think of translation as pedagogical work, teaching about another culture.

What the World Needs Now

As we approach the publication of Tomasz’s collection To the Letter in Mira’s English translation, we’ve been struck by how the book feels urgent in new and unexpected ways. First published in 2016 against the backdrop of authoritarianism rising across eastern Europe and a struggle between liberal and conservative paradigms in Poland, the collection’s plea for an absent hero who might be able to rescue twenty-first-century human beings feels even more pressing and global now.

TR: It’s always interesting to see how a book resonates and how it’s received in a foreign country when the translation replants it in different soil. The Polish context of those years when I wrote To the Letter has dissipated a bit, but at that moment it was a crucial thing for me. I saw it as the beginning of a decline of a happy period in our personal lives and, possibly, in the life of the nation as well, like the end of a great epoch.

It was a very depressing feeling, a very depressing winter, especially since it had been almost six years since I’d written any poetry. I was searching for a way to speak about all the things I’d experience over those six years, which for me is always a process of searching for a meter and a line of verse that can serve as a model.

That winter, I finally found one….

MR: Let’s mention it’s the line, or some variation of the line, “How I wish you were here.”

TR: Yes, and that phrase, “I wish you were here,” came to me from Pink Floyd’s refrain, but also from the same phrase used later by Barańczak and Brodsky in their poems. This is another example of how poetry in translation can inspire. And I started to write like mad: over the next ninety days I wrote nighty-nine poems. It was like a constant artistic delirium. Six years of silence, and then three months of madness.

I remember mumbling to myself in the store, on the train, everywhere I went—that’s how I compose, by memorizing my lines (which is why I need a meter), and when I have a stanza or a few stanzas, I write them down. That’s what I did, walking around for ninety days: to classes at the university, to the grocery store, walking my dog. All my anxieties about the future in Poland and the entire world pouring out.

And, indeed, it turned out to be the start of a very unpleasant time: political madness, conflicts around the world, climate changes, pandemics, and now the war in Ukraine, just next door to us. I hope it won’t continue like this.

MR: While To the Letter has all those anxieties in it, I think it also maintains hope, maybe because Tomasz wrote it at the beginning of the political changes in which we now seem mired. The fears it expresses have come to pass, or have intensified, or are still weighing us down around the world today.

Which is precisely why we need these poems and their insistence on love. Throughout the collection, the abstract noun “love” takes on the form of a fantastical creature, half-immortal and capable of metamorphosis, half-animal like a dog or some more feral beast, elusive and dangerous. The book seems to ask: what is the role of love, of human intimacy and individual connection, especially in relation to the political history that informs our present and already has designs on our future.

At the same time, there are things that strike me as utterly Polish and very local, which is one of the charms of the book. It’s rooted in the Silesian region, with all its attendant history and layering of identity. For those unfamiliar, the town where Tomasz grew up was once part of Germany until the borders shifted west after WWII, causing a forcible relocation of Poles from the east to these new western territories. A sense of absence, of a previous homeland lost, haunts so much of Tomasz’s writing.

And then there’s the additional absence of the Jewish population no longer there. The poems bring to light these repeating patterns of absence and ask how we can remain present, despite successive catastrophes that continue to repeat themselves today.

TR: I’d also add that it’s in the nature of poetry to reproduce sounds and voices coming to us from outside, like radio waves. Sometimes the poet is a receiver that can tune in to a certain emotional frequency and catch those sounds from the ether, just like a radio catches radio waves. We repeat them without even knowing much about where they came from or how long they traveled through space to reach us, how many stars they bounced off along the way. We are a resonance box for voices from the past, present, and future. We keep all the dead inside us.

Freedom in Translation

There was a learning curve when we first started working together. Things didn’t always go as planned, or they took longer, or they met with criticism. The translation of poetry faces particular challenges of perception and a dearth of publication options. But we’ve maintained a commitment to our collaboration as a space of discovery and joy—look what language can do! Amid small picture frustrations over nuances lost and big picture barriers to publication, we’ve gained a lot and found a steadfast trust in the process and each other.

MR: There was a watershed moment for me when translating Colonies. I was struggling over an interpretation of the poem “Sanctuary in the Mountains” and wrote to Tomasz about it: is this some sort of retelling of a fairytale? The poem seemed that strange and magical (it has a wizard in it).

And here’s the thing. When you’re reading a poem, you can allow it to be strange and mysterious, to draw from an alternate logic akin to a fairytale without fully understanding it. After all, we go to poetry for this kind of dream logic. But when translating, you have to make choices of interpretation as you bring it over into English, all the while trying to recreate its layering of metaphoric resonance that imbues it with poetic mystery.

“This is a very particular poem, encrypted,” Tomasz wrote back to me. “I’ve never spoken to anyone about it. It’s not based on a fairy tale but rather on Polish literature and its history—its form is a kind of cipher, as poets have been apt to use for centuries (a kind of game, like a secret Masonic Lodge). I cannot say anything more about it.” Well, then, I didn’t have to be able to explain it fully either! I felt much more permission and freedom after that.

TR: Ha ha! That’s really funny! Maybe next time I should be more open to explaining….I guess the translator has to be a bit of a private psychoanalyst or confessor of sorts (a Jesuit priest). I’m joking of course. But I’m well aware how inexplicable my own poems are even in Polish, for Polish readers and critics, how deeply personal and how deeply rooted in the Polish tradition they are, how the language is specific, how idiomatic it is, how the meter builds, how the rhymes are delicate—in short, how impossible it is to translate.

Then Mira sends the first draft of a translation, and step by step we write back and forth about it. It’s wonderful to see the whole process! Some translators don’t want to collaborate too much with the author. But Mira asks questions and discusses options sometimes, and I feel honored by this intimacy: I can observe the creation of a new poem in English and play a part in the translation process.

Then there’s the fact of the dominant role of English in the world. I know other translators sometimes check the English translations of my poems and compare them to their work. That dominant role is a privilege but, I can imagine, a pressure as well. I’m truly amazed by the choices Mira makes and the inventions she comes up with and how the translation is dealing with all the “impossibilities”—how ingenious it is. In this way, over the years of our collaboration, I’ve grown to trust and believe in her choices, experience, literary taste, and intuition.

MR: And I’ve come to really cherish getting to know things about the poems that no other reader or critic could ever guess—things Tomasz was thinking about or personal experiences behind the writing that are not revealed explicitly. For example, learning that the poem “To Give Water to the Thirsty” was about the death of Tomasz’s father. The biblical reference to Jesus’ last words on the cross—sure, some astute reader can pick up on that. But the “secret Masonic Lodge” of one’s personal allusions? What a joy to get a glimpse behind the door!

It’s a bit like spending time in a writer’s archive and seeing all the drafts, the revisions, the snippets of personal correspondence that show up in the poems. And that greater context allows me to enter the rewriting of the poem in a more intuitive way—to interiorize it, as Tomasz said earlier, and become its speaker—informed by what is not stated explicitly but charges the poem with depth.

I’m also very aware of the power structure that circumscribes us. On the one hand, we’re simply two poets working together and taking pleasure in the collaborative process. On the other hand, English means a global access point for so many more readers—even readers in other languages when, as Tomasz mentioned, the English is used as a relay translation. There are always going to be nuances that I’ll miss. But because of this positioning, I’d like to be as accurate as possible—which, by the way, doesn’t mean privileging sense but, rather, coming to my choices from as informed a position as possible.

TR: I would add to this Mira’s idea from her Kenyon Review essay “Voicing a Voice: Forty-nine questions about power, originality, performance, and what we mean when we talk about the translator’s voice in the translated text.” I think we have to interiorize the translation and give our voice to a text to let it speak.

When I read Mira’s English translations of my poems out loud in public, I can still recognize them as my poems. I can feel them, feel how they are still mine, though slightly different, just as we are always a slightly different person when speaking a foreign language. My English “I” is a bit strange to my Polish “I” and vice-versa, so the poems are perhaps a bit strange but in a good way, a way that is unexpected, new, exciting.

Yet they are still mine. You know, my favorite moment when writing is when my poem surprises me. In a good way, when I’m amazed by what just happened in the Polish. So, when it surprises me in English as well, I’m delighted.

MR: I wait for that moment of surprise, too, when the translation does something completely unexpected. It might sound counter-intuitive when it comes to translation. After all, isn’t everything already there in the original? What surprises could there be?

But I love when the English does its own thing, i.e., when it discovers a resonance of metaphoric meaning or builds a sonic quality not necessarily there in the same way in the original. I’ve come to understand these moments as what’s gained in translation.

*

Tomasz Różycki is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, most recently the volume The Beekeeper’s Hand and the novel The Lightbulb Thieves. He has garnered almost every prize Poland has to offer as well as widespread critical acclaim, with work translated into numerous languages and frequent appearances at international festivals. In the U.S., he has been featured at the 92nd St. Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, the Princeton Poetry Festival, and the Brooklyn Book Festival. His awards include the Kościelski Prize, the Wisława Szymborska Prize, and a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. He teaches French language, culture and literature at the University of Opole.

Mira Rosenthal is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection and finalist for the INDIES Book of the Year award, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, two Fulbright Fellowships, and residencies at Hedgebrook, The Jan Michalski Foundation, and MacDowell, she is an associate professor of creative writing at Cal Poly. Her translations of Polish poetry include Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline and Tomasz Różycki’s Colonies, which won the Northern California Book Award and was shortlisted for numerous other prizes, including the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

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To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki and translated by Mira Rosenthal is available via Archipelago Books.

Literary Hub is pleased to announce the 2024 class of Periplus Fellows. This year, Periplus awarded a total of 48 mentorships to writers of color living and working in the United States—selected from a pool of more than 500 applicants—pairing each one with a member of the collective, an established writer who will meet monthly with their mentee to foster community, support their writing practice, and advise on the nitty gritty of making a career as an artist.

“Periplus has given me incredible access to creative, professional, and social resources through its mentorship program,” said Hilal Isler, a 2023 Periplus Fellow, in a release. “As a first generation immigrant who doesn’t know anyone in the publishing industry—and who doesn’t have an MFA—I’ve found that Periplus has helped me progress on the journey toward publication, supporting me and connecting me to resources I need to make my dream of becoming an author a reality.”

The full list of 2024 fellows is below:

Alice Nguyen (she/her) is a journalist and fiction writer based in NYC. Her writing has appeared in NBC News, St. Louis Magazine, and K’in Literary Journal. Alice’s mentor is Mimi Lok.

Amari Amai is a black transmasculine poet and Great Migration baby, born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. They are a poet in residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, and a Watering Hole ‘23 fellow. Their work is influenced by black spiritual practices, weaving ancestral voices and histories with southern dialect to paint their black trans lived experiences. Amari’s mentor is Dustin Pearson.

Amy Zhou 周纯 (they/she) is a queer neurodivergent researcher-organizer, urban planner, and writer based on Ohlone land (Oakland, California). They write and create comics about memory, diaspora, land, and home. Amy’s mentor is Lauren Markham.

Angélica Martinez is a Venezuelan American writer, editor, and educator based in New York City. She holds an MFA from Hunter College and has received support from VONA/Voices. Angélica’s mentor is Kirstin Valdez Quade.

Anna Hui Tran (she/her) is a writer from Sydney, Australia, now living in Iowa, USA. Her work was previously shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award. Anna’s mentor is James Han Mattson.

Anthony Gomez III is an English PhD student at Stony Brook University and is based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a Chicano writer with fiction appearing in New Letters, Four Way Review, Shenandoah, and other literary magazines. Anthony’s mentor is Derek Palacio.

Arina Sarwari-Stadnyk (she/they) is a queer Afghan-Ukrainian linocut printmaker and writer on unceded Ohlone Lisjan land. Arina’s drawings, linocut prints, poems, and lyrical essays celebrate diasporic memory and intergenerational joy. Arina’s mentor is Sarah Perry.

Ashna Ali is a best-of-the-net-nominated queer, disabled, and diasporic Bangladeshi poet raised in Italy and based in Brooklyn. Their first collection, The Relativity of Living Well, is forthcoming from Bone Bouquet in 2024, and their work is featured in Split This Rock, The Margins, Nat. Brut, Zoeglossia, and beyond. Ashna’s mentor Diana Khoi Nguyen.

Audrey Kuo is an interdisciplinary artist, abolitionist, coach, and mischief enthusiast working toward collective liberation. Through their art and movement work, Audrey explores their belief that the work of liberation asks us to both dismantle systems of oppression and offer compelling, joyful alternatives. Audrey’s mentor is Zeyn Joukhadar.

Ben Brooks is an impatient black editor and novelist based in New York City. You can find more of what he’s writing, reading and translating on Instagram @soarticulit. Ben’s mentor is Zain Khalid.

Canela is a 2-Spirit Indigenous artist who grew up in the heart of Oaxacalifornia. Visit https://linktr.ee/canelacreator to learn more about their work. Canela’s mentor is Angelique Stevens.

D.L. Cordero is an afro-latinx and taíno fantasy author, occasional poet, and horror dabbler working out of Denver, CO. Their writing, found in literary magazines and anthologies, centers empowered, messy characters from historically oppressed groups, with the hope of minimizing isolation in sparkly oddballs. When not storytelling, Cordero can be found wrangling their pit bull and yellow lab while binging old-school anime. Follow them @dlcorderowrites and on dlcordero.com. D.L.’s mentor is A.E. Osworth.

daniel barrios (he/him) is a Dominican/Puerto Rican writer with indigenous roots living in New York City. He holds an MFA from Southern New Hampshire University, and he teaches English literature and composition at St. Paul’s School of Nursing. He is writing a collection of short stories. Daniel’s mentor is Jenzo DuQue.

David Renteria is a racquet stringer in Sacramento, California. He writes about his own private undocumentation, with pieces in Write Now! SF Bay, Berkeley Fiction Review, and Quarter After Eight. David’s mentor is Daniel Peña.

Derrel Furutani is a Japanese-American writer and educator living in Los Angeles, CA. Derrel’s mentor is Megan Kamalei Kakimoto.

Dianna Vega is a Dominican writer and poet based in Florida. Her poetry has appeared in Outrageous Fortune and South Dakota Review. Dianna’s mentor is Cleyvis Natera.

donia salem harhoor (they/she) is a disabled egyptian american anthophile and caregiver living in Lenapehoking whose work often considers how language, lineage, land, and dis-ease shape us. Executive director of The Outlet Dance Project, lover of foxes, tree lichen, & aunties cackling, their work has received support from RAWI, Lambda Literary, Roots.Wounds.Words, Open Mouth Poetry, Swim Pony, and others. donia’s mentor is Tracy Fuad.

Ellena Basada is a writer from Gresham, Oregon. A 2019-20 Fulbright Scholar in Berlin, she is interested in creative collaborations, technologies of memory and identity, and work that explores the self as an unreliable and anxious agent. Ellena’s mentor is Melissa Chadburn.

Erika DeShay is a Black poet and English teacher living in Denver, Colorado. Erika’s work grapples with finding joy in times of sorrow and has been published or is forthcoming in Spoken Black Girl, Fatal Flaw, 45 Magazine, Half and One, and The Cortland Review. Erika’s mentor is Marlanda Dekine.

Gerardo J Mercado is a Puerto rican poet and fiction writer, his work has been published in online magazines, multiple anthologies, and literary journals. Gerardo’s work focuses on the spiritual identity, the caribbean, and nature. Gerardo’s mentor is Libby Flores.

Hairol Ma is a Taiwanese-American writer from California. She is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories. Hairol’s mentor is R.O. Kwon.

Hayward Leach is a Brooklyn-born actor and writer published in Narratively and Porter House Review. He has received support from Meg Pillow’s Craft Year workshop, Tin House, Kimbilio, and Community of Writers; he is at work on a story collection and historical fiction novel about 1930s Mexico City. Hayward’s mentor is Kim Coleman Foote.

Isabella Lopez Procassini is a writer of literary and speculative fiction. She is working on a genre-bending short story collection about the beliefs and bodies we inherit. Isabella’s mentor is Deesha Philyaw.

Isra Rahman is a journalist and advocate in Chicago working on abolishing prisons, police, and carceral systems. In her writing she explores stories of love, grief, and community pertaining to her identity as South Asian Muslim. Isra’s mentor is Hilary Leichter.

Jamar Thrasher is a Pennsylvania-based writer of fiction and creative non-fiction. His stories commonly touch on the raw aspects of the emotive human experience, specifically those dealing with religion (Christianity in particular), race, and industry. Jamar’s mentor is Laura van den Berg.

Jamiella Brooks, writing under the pen name Parlei Rivière, is a Black mother-scholar, daughter, and descendant living in Philadelphia, PA who explores the intersections of language, anti-colonialism, and space. Her debut creative fiction story, “Space Treads,” can be found in Uncanny Magazine, where she also has a forthcoming piece, “Redshift || Shiftred.” Jamiella’s mentor is Jennine Capó Crucet.

Jenny Wu is a critic and educator based in New York City whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Jenny’s mentor is Angelica Jade Bastién.

Jessica Winkler is an award-nominated researcher of oral history and a 2023 Tin House Workshop alumna. Her memoir-in-progress tracks a common dream between four generations of women in her family. In it, she also explores what it means to fail a ritual, storytelling as survival, and intergenerational hope. She writes under her Chinese name, LiXin. Jessica’s mentor is Anna Qu.

Joy KMT is a mother, lover & Hoodoo Opulence. As a writer, she has received residencies and fellowships from Heinz, MacDowell, Callaloo, & VONA. They is published in many places, including Callalloo and Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. She is the winner of the Discovery Prize from Black Poetry Review. Her work is informed by maroon futurisms, liberation, spiritual fugitivity, & very very Black space-time. Joy’s mentor is Arthur Rickydoc Flowers.

Judy Jiang was born and raised in Oregon in a home with her parents, grandfather, and three siblings. She works, creates, and imagines as a writer, artist, and filmmaker. She is currently at work on a memoir on Chinese-American culture, daughterhood, loss, and grief. Judy’s mentor is Nadia Owusu.

Khalid Mitchell is a Charleston-based writer. He currently has work in Major 7th Magazine. Khalid’s mentor is Rion Amilcar Scott.

Laura Torlaschi is a Queens-based essayist previously published in The New York Times’ Tiny Love Stories, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Petit Mort, and P’an Ku. Drawing on her experience as the queer, disabled daughter of Argentinian immigrants, she explores themes of class, female sexuality, disability, and the American Dream. Laura’s mentor is Carina del valle Schorske.

Li Sian Goh is a Chinese-Singaporean writer who writes about art, authoritarianism, immigration and belonging. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Joyland Magazine, swamp pink, and No Tokens. She lives in New York, where she is at work on a short story collection and a novel. Li Sian’s mentor is Rachel Khong.

Lil Kalish is a Los Angeles based writer and journalist covering LGBTQ rights at HuffPost. Their reporting examines questions around rights to healthcare and bodily autonomy, tech privacy, and right-wing politics and appears in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, BuzzFeed News, CalMatters and more. Lil’s mentor is Alex Marzano-Lesnevich.

Loren Maria Guay is a poet and speculative fiction writer, with work published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, West Trade Review, Breakwater Review, Asymptote, khoreo, and others. Born in Asunción, Paraguay and raised in Brooklyn, NY, they are currently based in Chicago and can be found at lmguay.com. Loren’s mentor is Erica Mena.

Malik Washington is a writer, educator, and artist whose writing includes essays, poetry, plays, and short stories. Across these practices, Malik seeks to create spaces that invite learning, beauty, and interruptions of power and violence. He is the creator and editor of The Stevland Exchange, a community and online platform connecting people, culture, and memory through music. Malik’s mentor is Jenny Sadre Orafai.

Marissa Fretes is a writer originally from New York City and currently based in Washington, D.C. Her work has received support from the Jenny McKean Moore Workshop at George Washington University and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Marissa’s mentor is Yalitza Ferreras.

Maya Garcia is a Nicaraguan-American writer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received a dual Bachelor of Arts in English and Puerto Rican and Latino Studies from Brooklyn College in 2020 and an Advanced Certificate in Labor Studies from the Graduate Center of New York in 2021. Having previously accepted fellowships from VONA, the Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, The Seventh Wave Magazine, Macondo Writers Workshop, and the Loft Literary Center, her work seeks to explore the intersections of Latinidad, womanhood, queerness, and working-class identities. You can find her on instagram @mayag_23. Maya’s mentor is Teow Lim Goh.

Oluwabambi Ige is a Nigerian writer living in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in Agni, Story Magazine, Joyland, Columbia Journal, has won the Winter Tangerine Award for Prose, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and received support from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. He is working on his first novel. Oluwabambi’s mentor is Sidik Fofana.

Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez is a Mexican-Spanish-American poet based in Brooklyn. She is the Social Media & Membership Manager for Brooklyn Poets. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in HAD, Variant Lit, X-R-A-Y, Rejection Letters, and Heavy Feather Review, among others. Paula’s mentor is Adrienne Raphel.

Solomon Tesfaye is an Ethiopian writer, born and raised in a refugee camp in Yemen, and now living in D.C. He is currently querying his first novel, which explores the refugee experience through a transcontinental lens – Elsoloo.com. Solomon’s mentor is DK Nnuro.

Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer from California. She is calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day. Summer’s mentor is E. Alex Jung.

Swiss McCall is a Black, masculine-presenting lesbian writer and professor from Maplewood, NJ. She is currently working on cultivating and expanding her artistic scope into the genres of fiction and creative non-fiction. Swiss’s mentor is Denne Michele Norris.

Tania Perez Osuna is the eldest daughter of a Zapotec-Mexican family which incidentally means she is a translator, a bootleg paralegal, and a recovering unofficial therapist. She is currently working on a project that takes place on the southern AZ border where she grew up, a place that is full of magic, community, and grief caused by bad policy, disinvestment and greed. In her work she strives to capture the complexity of joy, as well as the nuanced ways she has witnessed life unfold. Tania’s mentor is Jami Nakamura Lin.

Tommy Kim lives in the San Fernando Valley with his wife and two daughters. His writing has appeared in JOYLAND and THE ST. PETERSBURG REVIEW, and he is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Tommy’s mentor is Joseph Han.

Tshaka Campbell is a poet, artist, performer and the first black Santa Clara County Poet Laureate. He is a husband and father inspired by life and asks the world to “Listen Different!” Tshaka’s mentor is Vincente Perez.

Veasna Has is an LBC-raised turned Queens-based writer whose work explores themes of family and cultural identity, rooted in her Cambodian American upbringing. Her writing has been supported by the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference and Kundiman. Veasna’s mentor is Nicole Chung.

Yazud E. Brito-Milian (they/them) is a Chicane poet, impatient collagist, abolitionist, and eldest sister. Born in Winston-Salem, NC, and based in Chicago, IL, they are working on their first chapbook dedicated to their dad’s black and yellow KORG M50 and the Sonideres who raised them. Their work can be found in Muzzle Magazine, Voicemail Poems, and The Poetry Project. Yazud’s mentor is Maceo Montoya.

This morning, The Story Prize—which seeks to recognize the best short story collection published every year—announced its three 2024 finalists, chosen from a total of 113 submissions. “Even after reading more than 20,000 short story collections over the twenty years this award has existed, we’re still encountering short story collections unlike any we’ve read before. These three books expand the form and offer profound observations about the human condition,” said Larry Dark, Director of The Story Prize, in a press release.

The winner will be announced on Tuesday, March 26, and will be awarded $20,000; each runner-up will receive $5,000.

The finalists are:

Yiyun Li, Wednesday’s Child
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Bennett Sims, Other Minds and Other Stories
(Two Dollar Radio)

Paul Yoon, The Hive and the Honey
(Marysue Rucci Books)

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Wendy Call and Shook. Wendy Call is an editor, writer, and translator. She is the author of the award-winning work of nonfiction No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) and the translator of two collections of poetry by the Mexican-Zapotec poet Irma Pineda. Call serves on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop’s MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Shook (David Shook) is a poet, translator, editor, and the founder of Phoneme Media, an imprint of Deep Vellum Publishing. They are the author of the poetry collection Our Obsidian Tongues (Eyewear Publishing, 2013). Shook has edited and published translations from more than thirty-five languages. They currently direct Kashkul Books, based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, as well as the translation-focused imprint avión, based at Gato Negro Ediciones in Mexico City.

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Poets.org: Translator Natasha Lehrer once said, “Translation is not a word-for-word transposition. It’s another iteration of the book.” With How to Be a Good Savage being a collaboration, what are your thoughts on this concept?

Wendy Call: Every translation is most definitely a new iteration of the book. How to Be a Good Savage includes selections from all six of Mikeas’s books, so it’s a book that hasn’t existed before. It was a three-way collaboration—between Mikeas, Shook, and me. Shook had translated many poems from Mikeas Sánchez’s first few books; I began translating her more recent work in 2018.

For this book, we each had our “own” poem translations and we traded many with each other for feedback. Because neither of us reads or speaks Zoque, we relied on Mikeas’s patient guidance to access the Zoque versions of her poems, line by line.

It was a pandemic project: we submitted our proposal to Milkweed on Earth Day 2020, and the final manuscript on New Year’s Day 2023. Once Shook and I had all the poem translations drafted, we were able to meet with Mikeas in Oaxaca, Mexico, for two days in October 2021. Together, the three of us decided on which poems to include and how to express many of the Zoque concepts. Mikeas doesn’t speak or read English, so we retranslated lines from our translations back into Spanish for her.

Over the following year, Shook and I revised our translations, in regular consultation with Mikeas. Six weeks before we delivered the manuscript to Milkweed, I was able to visit Mikeas in her village, Ajway, for the first time. I could see and smell the wewe flower that appears in several poems, walk around the hacienda (turned high school) where Zoque people were once forced into labor, hear Ajway’s soundscape, and meet family members who figure in her poems. That visit was essential to the final revision of our translations.

Shook: I like the idea of translation as iteration. In this instance, Mikeas herself produced the first two iterations, the Zoque and Spanish versions of each poem, which, as we explain in our introduction, typically began in one language or the other, depending on when they were written, but exert bidirectional influence in a way that perhaps only the work of a poet self-translating can. Co-iterations, perhaps.

And then our work as her translators is an iterative process, of course. I lost count of how many dozens of drafts I have of most of the poems I initially translated, some dating back well over a decade. Working with Wendy was a unique and enlightening process for me, and it made me a better translator. We each translated poems on our own, then exchanged those versions and responded with notes and questions for the other, and often for Mikeas too.

Poets.org: Much of Mikeas Sánchez’s work, especially the poems from her 2012 collection We’re All Maroons / Todos somos cimarrones (the eponymous poem is included in this collection), can be described as resistance to attempts at erasure—the erasure of Zoque language and culture, the erasure of women’s voices in patriarchal systems, the erasure of Mexico’s history of enslaving Africans, and the erasure of undocumented African immigrants in Europe—in order to preserve our collective humanity. In this vein, what is the title of this book prompting the reader to do, and what does “savage” mean to you?

WC: The Spanish word that we have translated as “savage”—salvaje—means both “savage” and “wild,” or since it’s a noun in this case, “wild being.” The Zoque word tzamapänh’ajä is a compound word: tzama is “mountain”” pänh is “man,” and ajä is “being,” to create “human being of the mountains.” (You can listen to Mikeas read the book’s title poem in Zoque and Spanish, and my English translation here.)

Mikeas says of her title choice, ‘In Zoque we use irony a lot, mocking ourselves as a protection strategy, through language, and through spells that are said to take away the power of others’ negative ideas about us. For more than five hundred years we had to adapt language and use it creatively to our advantage: resistance through words.”

Here in the United States, we have the genocidal history of the “bad Indian” trope. A parallel trope exists in Mexico. For me, the use of the word “savage” is a demand that English-speaking people—particularly those who identify as white—reconsider their assumptions about Indigenous / Native / First Nations people and listen carefully to their voices. As many of the poems in How to Be a Good Savage make clear, it is colonial /white/dominant culture that is truly savage.

Mikeas’s work pushes back beautifully against so many erasures. New Spain and Mexico enslaved both African-descended and Indigenous peoples. As we mention in our translators’ note, Sánchez’s own ancestors were forced into labor on a hacienda in Ajway.

In an inspiring reversal, one of the hacienda buildings is now the high school that her daughter, Matsa, attends. Mikeas had to leave her community to attend high school because one did not yet exist in Ajway. Matsa is receiving an education far more easily than her mother did because of the activism of women like Mikeas.

S: I don’t think I could put things more beautifully than Wendy has. I believe that the book’s title is a call to resist and renounce dehumanization—in general, certainly, but expressly the dehumanization of the Zoque and their Indigenous peers across the Americas and around the world; to subvert the pejorative historical uses and implications of the term “savage,” which has been used in Spanish as much as in English since the arrival of European colonizers to the Americas, with their allegedly civilized practices whose savagery cannot be denied.

I think it’s a call to take pride in both speaking and writing in “the gods’ language,” as Mikeas describes the Zoque spoken by her grandfather, “a poet / who healed with words,” in Wendy’s translation of the collection’s titular poem.

Poets.org: In the translator’s note, you concur with Sánchez’s statement: “I think this poetry is also a type of spell. It is a way to invoke our ancestors and be born again with them.” This comment also relates to Sánchez’s belief that her poetry comes “from the Zoque community as a whole.” What are your thoughts about the role of poetry in fostering and preserving community?

WC: Before I began working as a writer, editor, and educator, I devoted a decade to working full-time as a grassroots organizer. Most of the poetry—indeed, most of the art—that interests me springs from, connects to, and builds community.

I came to know Mikeas’s poetry through community. In 2011, with Irma Pineda, another Indigenous Mexican poet whose work I translated to English, I organized a retreat for Indigenous women writers. The gathering was sponsored by the Macondo Foundation, which supports socially engaged writers. Each of the twelve women who attended, including Mikeas, was (and is) deeply engaged in her community.

Coming to know Mikeas and her work since that three-day gathering has been an enormous gift in my life. When we met, Mikeas was the single mother of a toddler. She woke up at 4:30 every morning to write poetry before her daughter awakened. This month, Mikeas, Matsa (now a teen), and I are going on an eight-city book tour in Mexico, with Irma Pineda, whose second book of poetry that I’ve translated into English, Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater, is coming out in the same week as How to Be a Good Savage.

S: I’ve talked a lot about this with the Isthmus Zapotec poet Víctor Terán, not only in regard to preserving community but also preserving language and culture. Víctor speaks very eloquently about how important it has been for the young people of his community to see Isthmus Zapotec culture recognized and appreciated abroad, beyond the confines of a Spanish-dominant Mexican culture that tends to denigrate these vast and rich ancient languages as mere dialectos, a term that suggests their inferiority to the Spanish language both for self-expression and creating art.

From speaking with Mikeas, I know that we share the hope that this volume will inspire pride in Zoques, both in their home villages and in the diaspora, no matter how fluently they speak or understand the Zoque language.

I am looking forward to engaging with the many communities I know we will encounter as this book makes its way further into the world, taking on a life of its own. How to Be a Good Savage is very much a book that gestated in the community, more so than many of the other translations I’ve worked on as a translator or editor, and I do think that that community-mindedness is a part of its Zoque character and of Mikeas’s lifework, both in poetry and beyond.

Poets.org: Were there any linguistic challenges that appeared during the translation process—words or lines from the Zoque that showcased a depth of meaning too difficult to convey in either English or Spanish, or with no equivalents in either language?

WC: Linguistic challenges are a fundamental part of the translation process; they are what makes translation so much fun. Shook and I created a large spreadsheet to keep track of the names of places, deities, and figures from Zoque history and cosmology, as well as other words and concepts that didn’t transfer easily into English (or Spanish), with our ideas for how to express them in the English poems. The “Notes on the Poems” at the end of How to Be a Good Savage is a narrative expression of that spreadsheet. There is no word for “silence” in Zoque and there is no word for sankä in either Spanish or English.

Sometimes, it takes a paragraph to translate a word—something that can’t be done in a poem. As we wrote in those notes: Sanhkä, the Zoque word that Sánchez translates as resplandor in the Spanish version of the poem, and that we render in English as “radiance,” is a complex, multidimensional word. In addition to “radiance” it means “enlightened time” and also “understanding,” but is distinct from knowledge. Sanhkä refers to both the cycle of life and how knowledge is assimilated into a person’s life—but it does not refer to the knowledge itself.

S: The challenges are, I think, the attraction when it comes to translating poetry. I hope that part of what the unique trilingual format of How to Be a Good Savage provides the reader is a sense of the rich spaces between these languages, which have their own distinct, complex sociocultural and historical relationships, too.

I don’t know if there is a “depth of meaning” that is impossible to convey, but if you track the various line lengths across languages, you will definitely encounter instances in which equal conciseness seems impossible! While we firmly believe that the English-language iterations of Mikeas’s poems can stand entirely on their own, Wendy and I provided more information for those interested in learning more about Zoque cosmology and culture because there are so few resources available in English.

Poets.org: What are you reading now?

WC: I just finished an excellent anthology that I began reading with my grad students in the University of Iowa’s literary translation program this fall: Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation, edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang. I am on an anthology kick right now, reading both Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield (which every resident and fan of the Pacific Northwest should read) and Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most, edited by Erin Belieu and Carl Phillips.

I just started Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men, which was recommended to me by a stranger at the Getty Villa near Los Angeles, when I visited in June. I’m also reading the wonderful poetry and short prose that have been submitted for the 2025 edition of Best Literary Translations.

S: I’m reading both Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s Alice Sadie Celine and Douglas Kearney’s Optic Subwoof. I’m also really enjoying Heather Cleary’s translation of Luis Felipe Fabre’s Recital of the Dark Verses, a sort of madcap adventure about transferring the very fleshly remains of Saint John of the Cross to his final resting place.

For the last couple months, I’ve kept returning to Yasmine Seale’s translation of the Sudanese poet and activist Rania Mamoun’s collection Something Evergreen Called Life.

I also just reread Wendy’s other translation to be published this month, Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater, which I edited for the Phoneme imprint of Deep Vellum. It’s a remarkable companion book to this collection, and I highly recommend it.

Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?

WC: Oh, I love so many of them. But I will cast my vote for one that I adore and have enjoyed teaching to students in many different writing and literature classes, in both the United States and Colombia: Allison Hedge Coke’s “America, I Sing Back.”

S: Off the top of my head, I think immediately of Rachel Levitsky’s poem “Audience’ and of Attila József’s “The Seventh (A hetedik),” translated from the Hungarian by John Bátki. I deeply admire Fady Joudah’s translations of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems, and lately I have also returned to Darwish’s poem “I Belong There,” translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein. It ends:

To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.

______________________________

“enjambments,” a monthly interview series produced by the Academy of American Poets, will highlight an emerging or established poet who has recently published a poetry collection. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book, and a reading by the poet, will be published on Poets.org and shared in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.

Today, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation announced the recipients of the third annual Silvers-Dudley Prizes, which recognize “outstanding achievement in literary criticism, arts writing, and journalism.” The six winners will receive a total of $135,000—with individual prizes ranging from $15,000 to $30,000. The judges for the 2024 Silvers-Dudley Prizes were the poet Ange Mlinko, the writer Hari Kunzru, and Christopher Carroll, the editor of Harper’s magazine.

“The Silvers Foundation is delighted once again to award these prizes, among the richest such awards for nonfiction writing, to outstanding practitioners of the genres that Bob so assiduously nurtured at the New York Review,” said Daniel Mendelsohn, Director of the Foundation, in a press release. “In rewarding these six brilliant and original critics and journalists, we honor not only their work but Bob’s wish, as expressed in his will, to “support writers”–in this case, by spotlighting the critical and journalistic work being done by both established practitioners of the craft and by writers who making their mark more recently. We know that Bob and Grace–herself a passionate enthusiast of the visual and performing arts–would be as thrilled as we are to see these six writers honored.”

Here are this year’s winners:

The 2024 Robert B. Silvers Prizes for Literary Criticism
Recognizing achievement in long-form literary criticism and the intellectual and cultural essay

Marina Warner
Jennifer Wilson

The 2024 Grace Dudley Prizes for Arts Writing
Recognizing achievement in critical writing on the fine and performing arts or on cultural history

Svetlana Alpers
Harmony Holiday

The 2024 Robert B. Silvers Prizes for Journalism
Recognizing achievement in reporting, long-form political analysis, or commentary

Fintan O’Toole
Krithika Varagur

Happy New Year, readers. 2023 had its ups and downs (mostly downs), but as always, at least it brought us some very good books. But now that you’ve read all the books last year had to offer (right?), it’s time for a brand new list.

Here are the books Literary Hub editors are most looking forward to (so far!) in the months to come.

JANUARY

Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made
S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, January 2

This highly anticipated debut novel from Vanessa Chan tells the story of a housewife turned spy in occupied Malaya during WWII. The chapters alternate between Cecily’s perspective and those of her children: her teenage son, one of many who’s gone missing; her daughter Jujube, who spends her days catering to Japanese soldiers; and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, hidden away for her own safety. An epic historical novel that’s both propulsive and poignant—expect to see this one about town. –Eliza Smith, special projects editor

Tara Isabella Burton, Here in Avalon
Simon & Schuster, January 2

Tara Isabella Burton is a fascinating thinker and writer—she has a doctorate in theology from Oxford, and in addition to novels she writes nonfiction on things like contemporary American post-religious spirituality and our obsession with self-branding. I particularly loved her 2018 novel Social Creature (think Tom Ripley gets Instagram), so would I like to read her new book about a possibly magical theater cult? I would, I would. –Emily Temple, managing editor

Mike McCormack, This Plague of Souls
Soho Press, January 2

I was blown away—or let’s be specific and say both profoundly moved and intellectually thrilled—by Irish writer McCormack’s 2016 Solar Bones, a novel about death (and also, necessarily, life) told in a single, enthralling sentence. Thus it is no surprise I am very much anticipating his next book, an “existential noir” in which a man returns home from prison to find his house empty, his family gone—and calls from a mysterious man who claims he can reveal the truth. –ET

Kate Brody, Rabbit Hole
Soho Crime, January 2

This promising debut looks perfect for our Internet sleuth-y, murder-fixated age. It’s about a woman named Teddy whose sister, Angie, disappeared ten years ago, leaving behind a cold case and a broken family. Now their father has killed himself, and upon going through his belongings, Teddy discovers that he was involved in a Reddit community concentrated on solving Angie’s case. Teddy can’t help herself and falls down the “rabbit hole” of the Reddit community’s obsession, and allows it to take over her life. She forms a friendship with another member of the community, and slowly but surely loses sense of any previous priority, loses sense of who she was before. It’s twisty and addictive, just like the Reddit community, and the reader becomes as obsessed as Teddy is to solve this mystery. –Julia Hass, contributing editor

Alvaro Enrigue, trans. Natasha Wimmer, You Dreamed of Empires
Riverhead, January 9

Hell yes. I’m very much looking forward to reading another one of Enrigue’s bonkers, brain-bending historical novels (in his 2016 novel, Sudden Death, also translated by Wimmer, the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo play tennis with a ball made from Anne Boleyn’s hair). Cortés also features heavily in Sudden Death, and Enrigue returns to his story in You Dreamed of Empire—but of course, it will not be the story we know, but a strange, fantastical version, Enrigue-style. Can’t wait. –ET

Julie Myerson, Nonfiction
Tin House Books, January 2

Myerson’s latest novel is an urgent, edged book about a novelist’s relationship with her daughter, who has sunk into a dangerous form of drug addiction, and also her own, cold, mother, or rather her memory of her. As a new parent I thought I might not be able to handle this novel, but as it turned out, I couldn’t stop reading. –ET

Olivie Blake, The Atlas Complex
Tor Books, January 9

Olivie Blake concludes her much-celebrated dark-academia trilogy in suitably devastating fashion. The six Alexandria Society initiates are back together and back in the library, but not for long: their dangerous caretaker Atlas Blake is still working on his world-ending plan. Expect equal parts romantasy and philosophy—Blake writing about the ethics of power is always a fun ride. –Drew Broussard, contributing editor

Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer
Ecco, January 9

The latest from PEN/Faulkner nominee Oshetsky is about a young girl trying to come to terms with the death of her friend. But instead of facing the tragedy, she spins happily-ever-after stories for herself—until a strange creature called Poor Deer makes its way into her tales and demands the truth. By turns strange, beautiful, and tragic, Oshetsky’s story of tragedy and redemption is charming and eerie. –DB

Elizabeth Flock, The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice
Harper Books, January 9

Journalist Elizabeth Flock looks at justice with a Taddeo-esque approach, telling the stories of three women who killed after a wrong. There is a Southern U.S. woman who killed her rapist; the leader of a northern Indian gang that avenges victims of domestic violence; and a fighter in an all-female militia in Syria, where ISIS is working to dismantle the lives and rights of women.  –JM

Jami Attenberg, 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round
S&S/Simon Element, January 9

Devotees of Attenberg’s fiction (All Grown Up, All This Could Be Yours, many others), and her pandemic-sparked newsletter, Craft Talk, have used her 1000-words-a-day-in-summer model to push novel and book projects along, helped by Attenberg’s feel-good approach to the sweaty toil of ~generative~ work. This offshoot of the project stretches the approach to get you through the year and includes tips from other Names like comedian and essayist Josh Gondelman. It will be the new Bird by Bird, you heard it here first. –JM

Jill McCorkle, Old Crimes: Stories
Algonquin Books, January 9

Those waiting for more of Jill McCorkle following her most recent novel Hieroglyphics are in for a treat. Her new short story collection is out January 9, and includes a couple who bring a confession booth into their home, initially for fun, and a phone-line service-man (think the Norman Rockwell painting) who feels estranged from his family in the mobile age. Take me there, Jill! –JM

Hisham Matar, My Friends
Random House, January 9

American-Libyan Hisham Matar has written an exile novel with the Arab Spring at its center, pushed along by the power of fiction. Khaled’s journey from Libya to the UK begins when he hears a short story read on the radio about a man eaten alive by a cat–it’s the early days of his waking up to understand the Qaddafi regime. He leaves his parents behind and moves to London to study. There, he attends a protest that turns ugly, stranding him outside his country and family. People who loved Matar’s In the Country of Men will be on this one early. –JM

Linnea Axelsson, trans. Saskia Vogel, Aednan
Knopf, January 9

This family epic about two Sámi families begins in the 1910s with matriarch Ristin leading a reindeer migration meets with the new border between Sweden and Norway, rupturing family and culture. Fifty years on, Lise is “educated” in a boarding school for indigenous children, and her daughter Sandra later on fights for Sámi land rights. Listen to a sample here. –JM

Lea Carpenter, Ilium
Knopf, January 16

At last Lea Carpenter is back (after 2018’s Red, White, Blue) with another sideways approach to the international spy novel—in this one, a young woman is swept off her feet by a much older suitor, but after they’re married, he asks her for a “favor”…never a good thing. –ET

Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland
FSG, January 16 

Marie-Helene Bertino’s wry, melancholy, utterly bewitching third novel is the coming-of-age story of a young Philadelphia woman named Adina who also happens to be an alien—born in 1977 to a hardworking Italian-American “Earth mother” but “activated” at age four by her extraterrestrial superiors and tasked with sending dispatches about the nature of humanity back to her home planet (though where that planet is, what life might be like there, or what her true kin even look like, Adina does not know). Deftly blurring the line between reality and metaphor to create a work of exquisite beauty, joyfully off-kilter humor, and aching sorrow, Beautyland, and Adina’s lonesome journey, will fill and then shatter your heart. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor-in-chief

Susan Muaddi Darraj, Behind You is the Sea
HarperVia, January 16

This debut novel-in-stories from the award-winning author of A Curious Land: Stories from Home and the Farah Rocks children’s book series is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore, focusing on three immigrant families and their differing experiences of life in the U.S. Muaddi Darraj, a vocal advocate for Palestinian culture who won an American Book Award in 2016, has written a rich, complex, and moving immigrant story with a beautifully-rendered ensemble cast. –DS

Manjula Martin, The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History
Pantheon, January 16

If you’ve fantasized about moving back to your childhood home, you know it can never be quite the same. For Manjula Martin, a tree-change to the Sonoma forests is defined by the naked threat of forest fires and climate change: in 2020, she was evacuated as the state burned. A personal history turned examination of fire and ecology, The Last Fire Season is strangely timely amid a balmy winter some have never experienced before. –JM

Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
Doubleday, January 16

Kyle Chayka is a master at capturing truths about our online existence (like why the internet isn’t fun anymore) in a manner as astute as it is entertaining. His sophomore book “traces the creeping, machine-guided curation” of the all-powerful algorithm “as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces.” I’m as terrified as I am excited to read this one. –Jessie Gaynor, senior editor

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Knopf, January 23 

This satirical autobiographical debut novel by Iranian-American writer and Poetry Editor of The Nation is the story of a newly sober, martyr-obsessed orphaned son of Iranian immigrants who embarks on a quest to uncover for a long-buried family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. The buzz around Martyr has been intense, and if it’s even a fraction as good as the wildly effusive blurbs suggest (“An absolute jewel of a novel. A diamond. I haven’t loved a book this much in years,” said Tommy Orange, while Lauren Groff called it “The best novel you’ll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.”), it promises to be one of the most dazzling debuts of the year. –DS

Lee Gutkind, The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction
Yale University Press, January 23

Though I am sure there were plenty of people who knew how to be weird while telling true stories prior, Lee Gutkind is credited with “fathering” the CNF movement in the ‘60s. Here, he traces his own route from Easy Rider bikie to academic and writer, and looks at how writers like Joan Didion, Uptown Sinclair, Janet Malcolm and James Baldwin navigated the gap between facts and storytelling. –JM

Christina Cooke, Broughtupsy
Catapult, January 23

I’ve been looking forward to this since I heard Cooke read the opening pages nearly two years ago. Set in the 1990s in Jamaica, this assured debut begins when Akúa’s brother dies and she leaves Canada to return to her native Jamaica in the hopes of reconnecting with her sister, Tamika. But when Akúa starts spending her time with a stripper, the difficult realities of being gay in a religious family and in a homophobic society provoke a reckoning for Akúa and Tamika. –DB

Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
FSG, January 23

In 2023, with Verso, Adam Shatz published Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which looked at the sometimes thorny relationship between contemporary writers’ writing and their politics, so a biography of Frantz Fanon makes sense as the subject of his new book. The Rebel’s Clinic charts the life of Fanon, who left Martinique to fight for France in WW2, then found himself drawn into Existentialism in the postwar years. An examination of one of the pre-eminent writers and activists of the postcolonial period, The Rebel’s Clinic also serves as a primer for Fanon’s most famous works, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. –Samuel Rutter, contributing editor

Kiley Reid, Come and Get It
Putnam, January 30

As a massive Such a Fun Age fan, I’ve been waiting for the new Kiley Reid for a long time. I thought her 2020 novel was so incisive and accessible, plotty and smart, that it makes me all the more excited for her next venture. Reid was good at every part of that story: depicting whiteness, the bond between babysitter and child, being 25 and lost, she could do it all, and did it all with warmth and empathy, even for the characters who didn’t always deserve it. This new book promises all the same ability at depth and poignancy through a fun, plotty story: a campus novel this time, about an RA named Millie, and her entanglement with a visiting professor. It’s a perfect recipe for a great January read: in a college setting, about discretion and desire, about money, want, and, most importantly, it’s by Kiley Reid. –JH

Chris Dixon, Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet
Random House, January 30

One of the curious things about the internet is that discourse about the internet is often led by the same VCs and tech visionaries looking to capitalize on it, as evidenced by the rupture around EA in 2023. Read Write Own promises to put the eras of internet in context up to web3, and is blurbed by Bob Iger, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban (“Shark Tank; Dallas Mavericks”) and the president of Coinbase. –JM

Gregory Pardlo, Spectral Evidence
Knopf, January 30

When one of America’s foremost poets publishes a collection for the first time in nearly a decade it is a major event—particularly when that poet is uniquely suited to grappling with what’s been going on in America over the past nine years… Spectral Evidence is Gregory Pardlo’s first collection of poetry since he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015, and it picks up where Digest left off. As ever Pardlo moves through poetic registers with ease, from high to low and back again, as he witnesses the world in all its terrible beauty. From fallen heroes of professional wrestling (seriously) to this country’s infinite hostility to its Black citizens, Pardlo’s is the poetic eye (and heart) we need right now. –Jonny Diamond, editor in chief

Ijeoma Oluo, Be a Revolution
Harper One, January 30

Ijeoma Oluo’s breakout hit So You Want To Talk About Race came out in 2018 but was discovered by many readers as the 2020 murder of George Floyd galvanized people across the U.S. to face the racist undercurrents. Be a Revolution sets out to look at how everyday people are using anti-racist approaches to reform systems big and small–in schools, in hospitals, in criminal justice–and map a way forward for those who want to push for change. –JM

Kwame Alexander, ed., This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets
Little, Brown, January 30

This collection of “resilient joy” includes work from Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith and Terrance Hayes that captures poignant moments of beauty and pride: Jacqueline A.Trimble likens “Black woman joy” to indigo, tassels, foxes, and peacock plumes. Tyree Daye, Nate Marshall, and Elizabeth Acevedo reflect on the meaning of “home” through food, from Cuban rice and beans to fried chicken gizzards. I feel this will make a good gift in 2024. –JM