In May 2026, Cheuse Center board member Katherine E. Young’s translation of Akram Aylisli’s People and Trees (Plamen Press) was named one of three finalists for the 2026 European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize. The winning author and translator will be announced on 2 July at an awards ceremony at the EBRD’s headquarters in London. 

For the past few months, I have been carrying with me a book of haikus, or near haikus, by the Japanese poet Sayumi Kamakura, translated into English by James Shea. Applause for a Cloud, published last year by Black Ocean press in Boston, begins with these lines: 

I met Kwiatkowksi over a series of events in September and October of 2025, as he traveled in the US with the Cheuse Center at George Mason University and Yale University. Grzegorz Kwiatkowksi is the Cheuse Center’s Visiting Writer from Poland, and the center is collaborating with him on a series of events that mark the tenth anniversary of the Cheuse Center, founded in 2016. The center was named after Alan Cheuse, whose father was a Jewish refugee to America, from Stalin’s Russia (now Ukraine).