Let's Talk: International Writers Festival
Monday, September 29, 2025 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM EDT
Busboys and Poets, 2021 14th NW, Washington DC 20009
RSVP HERE.
Run of Show
5:30pm: Doors Open
6:00 pm: Marta Sanz & Katie King in conversation
Writing women’s bodies: tragedy or comedy?
In MY CLAVICLE: AND OTHER MASSIVE MISALIGNMENTS, award-winning Spanish author Marta Sanz’s first book published in English, she dissects how society perceives women; their bodies, their pain, their fears. Humor is her scalpel. With translator Katie King, Marta describes weaving together comedy, tragedy and anatomy in this part memoir, part medical mystery, part social critique.
Intermission with Marta's book signing
7pm: Peter Cole
With a focus on his translations from Arabic
7:15-8:30pm: A Bouquet of Writers
If you throw a flower in another language into the air, who will catch it?
Let’s make a bouquet together in many languages!
Please join us for a Big Tent Community Reading, a chance to convene
and bring together literary translators and multilingual writers in the DMV for a kaleidoscopic reading and gathering.
Featuring blossoms from our world's many languages: English, Hindi, Tamil,
Polish, Faroese, Spanish, Russian, Kosovo, Ukrainian,
Croatian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and more!
ABOUT THE READERS
Rohan Chhetri is a poet, translator, and editor currently based in Houston, TX. His latest book is Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful. A recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant for translation, his translation of the Nepali poet Avinash Shrestha's selected poems, The Dust Draws its Face on the Wind, was published in 2024 by HarperCollins India. His poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, among others.
Peter Cole’s most recent book of poems is Draw Me After (FSG). His new translations include Requiem, by Aharon Shabtai (New Directions) and On the Slaughter: Selected Poems, by Haim Nahman Bialik (NYRB, forthcoming). He also recently published That Simple?… That Complicated: Conversations on Poetry and Translation (Free Poetry). Cole has translated widely from Hebrew and Arabic, medieval and modern, and has received numerous honors for his work, including a PEN Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Jewish Book Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
Jona Colson is Queer poet, educator, and translator. His poetry collection, Said Through Glass, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. He is also the translator of Aguas/Waters by Miguel Avero and the co-editor of This Is What America Looks Like: Poetry and Fiction from D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (2021). His poems, translations, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, LitHub, and elsewhere. He is co-president of Washington Writers’ Publishing House and edits the bi-weekly journal, WWPH Writes. He is a professor of ESL at Montgomery College and lives in Washington, D.C. www.jonacolson.com
Sharif Elmusa is a widely published poet, scholar, and translator. He co-edited, and contributed to, the anthology, Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry. Sharif's co-translations of Arabic poetry and short fiction are available in, among others, Salma Khadra Jayyusi anthology series, including Modern Palestinian Literature and in many journals, including Literature Today. Elmusa was previously an associate professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo. He served for four years as director of the Middle East Studies Program. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Cairo University and doctorate from the MIT. He is Palestinian by birth, American by citizenship.
Marguerite Feitlowitz has published five volumes of translations from French and Spanish, most recently Night, by Ennio Moltedo, Pillar of Salt: An Autobiography with Nineteen Erotic Sonnets, by Salvador Novo, and plays by Griselda Gambaro. She is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture.
Katie King is a journalist and literary translator who holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies. Her translations of Spanish poetry and prose have been published in Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, Columbia Journal, Translation Review, and The Spanish Riveter and in print anthologies by Graywolf Press and Ecco Press. Her full-length book translations include Someone Speaks Your Name (Swan Isle Press, January 2023) and One Year and Three Months (Broken Bowl Books, forthcoming October 2025), both by Luis García Montero, director of Spain’s Cervantes Institute and My Clavicle, (Unnamed Press, July 2025).
Roman Kostovski is a publisher, writer, and literary translator. He has translated poetry and prose from nine languages into English, with work in Poet Lore and Absinthe. He has published three books of prose, one of poetry, and an album of bard poetry, received a 2017 NEA Translation Fellowship, and founded Washington, D.C.–based Plamen Press in 2014.
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski (b. 1984) – writer, musician, activist, and academic. His work focuses on history, memory, and ethics. He is the author of several books published and translated in the United States, Germany, France, Greece, and Slovenia. He is the current Artist-in-Residence at Yale University and the curator of the series What About Exclusion? and Virus of Hate at the University of Oxford.
Judy Leserman is a poet and translator living in New York City and is the author of the chapbook When Spring Could Be Anyone (Aquila Review). She is the co-director of literary translation programs for the Cheuse Center and is an editorial reader for Poetry Daily. In addition to her work at the Cheuse Center, Judy also studies rabbinics at Yeshivat Maharat.
Mujib Mehrdad is an award-winning poet, journalist, writer, and translator, and formerly lectured at Albirony University. His published works include one novel, four poetry collections, and a volume of essays. He currently serves as an editorial associate at LinkedIn.
Homa Mojadidi is an Afghan American poet and translator. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Washington Square Review, One Art, Beyond Words, Blue Mountain Review, and Mudlark. Homa has an M.A. in English Literature from the University of North Florida and an M.F.A. in creative writing from George Mason University.
Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems include The Kuruntokai and its Mirror and After. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA Poetry program at George Mason University.
Yvette Neisser is an award-winning poet, Spanish translator, and founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT). Her co-translation of Venezuelan poet María Teresa Ogliastri’s “From the Diary of Madame Mao” won the Carnegie Mellon University Press Translation Prize and is forthcoming in 2026.
Marta Sanz is an award-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and scholar, and one of Spain’s leading feminist writers. In the last two decades she has written 15 novels and four collections of poetry, in addition to her edited anthologies and frequent contributions to major Spanish media publications including EL PAÍS, El Mundo, Público and Infolibre. She is a frequent guest commentator and public speaker at mainstream media outlets and literary events. My Clavicle, an innovative work of autobiographical fiction that is part medical mystery story and part social critique, is her first book translated into English.
Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and translator working from Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian (BCMS). She cofounded Turkoslavia, a collective and journal dedicated to publishing translations from Turkic and Slavic languages, loosely defined. She holds a PhD in comparative literature.
Sergio Waisman has translated fiction by Mariano Azuela, Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer, Juana Manuela Gorriti, and Nataniel Aguirre, and, in collaboration with Yaki Setton, poetry by Mirta Rosenberg, Muriel Rukeyser, and C.D. Wright. He is the author of Borges and Translation and the novels Leaving and El encargo.
Randi Ward is a poet, translator, lyricist, and photographer from West Virginia. Her translations of Faroese poetry have twice won the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Prize. In 2024, the government of the Faroe Islands honored Ward with Heiðursgáva Landsins, a national award for distinguished service to Faroese culture.
Katherine E. Young is the author of two poetry collections, Day of the Border Guards and Woman Drinking Absinthe, and editor of Written in Arlington. Her translations of Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Russian, and Ukrainian writers have received international recognition. From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Arlington, VA.
Dinner service from 5:30-8:30pm.
8:30pm: Event ends
This Cheuse Center thanks its partners and well-wishers: Busboys and Poets, The Middle East Institute, Mason Exhibitions, and AAAS.
