Day of Translation: Sept 30, 2025
Tuesday, September 30, 2025 12:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT
Art & Design Building, Gillespie Gallery, First Floor, Art and Design Bldg Fairfax
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 Event, a chance to convene and bring together ideas, literary translators and multilingual writers from around the world alongside writers from the DMV for a festival of translation.
Location: Gillespie Gallery, 1st Floor Art and Design Building, 4515 Patriot Circle, Fairfax
Bus stop: Mason shuttle stop is nearby. Please use google maps to find us.
Parking: Shenandoah Parking Deck (Validation will be provided for readers. Please save your receipt)
Program: attend part or all of the afternoon!
11:45 am Arrivals
12:00 pm: Panel 1: featuring Cheuse Visiting Writer from Poland Grzegorz Kwiatkowski and Randi Ward
01:15 pm: Lunch will be served
01:30 pm: Panel 2: featuring Rohan Chhetri, Ena Selimović, Roman Kostovski and Vivek Narayanan
03:00 pm: Panel 3: featuring Cheuse Writer-in-Residence from Spain Marta Sanz and Katie King in conversation with Katherine E. Young
04:30 pm: Keynote Conversation: Featuring Peter Cole, visiting from Yale; and Judy Leserman
05:30-6:30 pm: Networking reception
MP Alladin, Las Palmas (The Palms), 48 x 48 inches
About the Exhibition: BEFORE THE AMERICAS
August 25th - November 15th, 2025
Curated by Cheryl Edwards
Before the Americas is an art historical survey featuring 45 works by Afro-Latino, Caribbean, and African American artists, many of whom have lived and worked in Greater Washington. These artists confront racial and colonial constructs and have often been invisible within common art historical narratives. Their works span painting, printmaking, sculpture, book art, performance, and video art. The exhibit traces the significance of these artists through four themes: Genetic Memory, Migration, Invisibility, and Interconnectivity. A public symposium of artists, collectors, and scholars will occur during the exhibition, and additional public programs will engage students and the public. A printed catalogue will be published and will be available online.
Learn more here: https://www.masonexhibitions.org/exhibitions/before-the-americas
PANEL DETAILS:
12:00 pm: Panel 1: A MATTER OF RECORD: RECLAIMING HISTORIES THROUGH POETRY: Accounts from Poland, West Virginia, and the Faroe Islands, featuring Cheuse Visiting Writer from Poland Grzegorz Kwiatkowski and Randi Ward
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski and Randi Ward are celebrated contemporary artists known for drawing parallels between historical traumas in their communities and the alarming trajectories of current global events. From Stutthof concentration camp in Poland to the toxic dump sites of DuPont’s Washington Works chemical plant in West Virginia, the disturbing immediacy of Kwiatkowski and Ward’s stark work reminds us that the past is never just the past. Its political and historical legacies are constantly taking shape before our very eyes: in the hyper-exploitation of the environment and marginalized peoples the world over, in the divisive rhetoric increasingly permeating our everyday lives. In light of this, the authors will discuss their creative work to not only expose mechanisms of violence, but remedy injustice.
Kwiatkowski will read from his acclaimed poetry collection Crops (translated into English by Peter Constantine), as well as from his new English manuscript Without an Orchestra. He will also present poems written during his Yale Artist-in-Residence project this year, based on Holocaust testimonies. In addition, Kwiatkowski will speak about his memory activism in Gdańsk and at the Stutthof concentration camp site, where he discovered, near the museum fence, almost half a million pairs of shoes—most of them still decaying in plain sight—that had belonged to Jewish victims. He continues to fight for their protection, exhibition, and commemoration.
Ward will read from her project-in-progress Groundwork, then present an excerpt of Faroese poet Kim Simonsen’s What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium. Simonsen’s collection demonstrates how we can resist systemic forces that have estranged us from ourselves, each other, and Earth’s ecosystems by reconceptualizing humankind—as a species among species—within the greater kinship of matter.
*
01:30 pm: Panel 2: EMBODIED TRANSLATION: featuring Rohan Chhetri, Ena Selimović, Roman Kostovski and moderated by Vivek Narayanan
How might we tap into languages other than English hidden in us, by childhood encounters or immersions? What could migrants and their descendants, who embody translation in their very being, bring to the translation encounter? Three writer-translators discuss their journeys in translation.
*
03:00 pm: Panel 3: TRANSLATING THE FEMALE BODY: featuring Cheuse Writer-in-Residence from Spain Marta Sanz and Katie King in conversation with Katherine E. Young
How do issues of women’s health and well-being translate across cultures and languages? Using prose, poetry, journalism, and epistolary non-fiction, Cheuse Center visiting writer Marta Sanz (Spain) and Russian writer-in-exile Anna Starobinets employ tropes from surrealism to horror to humor to frame women’s experiences from pregnancy loss to menopause. Both writers deliberately challenge not just literary conventions but cultural taboos around “women’s issues,” including standards of care for women in their respective countries. Sanz joins her American translator, Katie King, and Katherine E. Young (translator of Starobinets) to talk about writing the female body.
*
04:30 pm: Keynote Conversation: TRANSLATORS OF DESIRE featuring Peter Cole, visiting from Yale; and Judy Leserman
Borges said that the translator’s art is in some ways superior to that of original writing. Robert Frost, reportedly, wondered if it was art at all. MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole will talk with GMU MFA alum and poet-translator Judy Leserman about all this and more in a wide-ranging discussion that will touch on what leads them to translation again and again (as readers and practitioners), and also what sometimes drives them away from it. They’ll explore the profound insanity and even inanity of translation, its political, textural, and spiritual significance, as well as its crucial role in the evolution of world poetries and the growth of individual poets.
ABOUT OUR PANELISTS:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Cheuse Center gives special thanks to Mason Exhibitions, The Middle East Institute, AAAS, and the Mason English department and MFA.
