Third Annual Bouquet of Languages Reading at Busboys and Poets in DC
Monday, September 28, 2026 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
Busboys and Poets 14th and V St NW
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 our annual International Writers Festival, 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.
The night will start off with a reading by B. Jeyamohan, the legendary Tamil and Malayalam language writer and literary critic, as well as Marina Perezagua, acclaimed Spanish author and Cheuse Writer in Residence, followed by a bouquet of translations from the following languages: Spanish, French, Tamil, Farsi, Hebrew, Bengali, and more. Copies of Jeyamohan's books, along with books of other readers, will be available for purchase. Anna Deeny Morales, celebrated poet, translator, scholar, and librettist, will host the evening's event.
Jeyamohan is a Tamil writer and literary critic whose remarkably prolific career began with the publication of an award winning novel in 1987. Since then he has authored over twenty five novels (including a 26,000-page epic novel, reimagination of the Mahabharata) and more than three hundred short stories; writer biographies; travelogues;books on literature, criticism, philosophy, heritage, and self-discovery and more. As an orator of repute, he has delivered several talks on topics pertaining to literature, philosophy, religion, culture, and tradition. He also writes in Malayalam.
Jeyamohan is also the founder of major cultural movements in Tamil, including Vishnupuram Literary Circle, a global literary organization; Tamil Wiki, an online encyclopedia of Tamil arts and literature;and Nityavanam, an institute of learning focused on philosophy and culture. He lives in Nagercoil, India.
Stories of the True (FSG, 2025), a short story collection, was a finalist for the ALTA National Translation Award in 2023. White Elephant (FSG, 2026), recounts the Great Indian Famine of 1876-1878 devastating cost to both life and human dignity.
Marina Perezagua has a degree in Art History from the University of Seville. She taught classes in Hispano-American language, literature, history, and film at the State University of New York, where she completed her doctorate in Hispanic Philology. After living for a long time in France and working at the Cervantes Institute in Lyons, she returned to New York, where she taught creative writing classes at New York University as Distinguished Writer in Residence. She is the author of the short story collections Criaturas abisales and Leche. She has published three novels: The Story of H, Don Quijote de Manhattan and Seis formas de morir en Texas (Anagrama), and a poetry book: Nana de la Medusa (Espasa). She will soon publish a book about the life story of the world’s number two freediver, Miguel Lozano, entitled A-122 metros (Planeta). She has published in a range of anthologies and literary magazines, including Renacimiento, Carátula, Sibila, Ñ, Quimera, Granta, Letras Libres, JotDown, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Anfibia. Her work has been translated into nine languages and her novel The Story of H won the 2016 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. She writes for El País.
Anna Deeny Morales was born in Washington D.C. and grew up between Puerto Rico and her native city. She earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches in History and Literature at Harvard. She works on topics related to Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, poetry and philosophy, comparative North/South literatures and translation. Deeny Morales has translated several collections of Raúl Zurita'spoetry, including Purgatory (University of California Press, 2009), Dreams for Kurosawa (arrow as aarow press, 2012), and Sky Below (Northwestern University Press, 2016). Other translations include Floating Lanterns by Mercedes Roffé (Shearsman Press, 2015) as well as her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik, which were included in Pinholes in the Night (Copper Canyon Press, 2015).
Deeny Morales has also published translations of poetry by Gabriela Mistral, Idea Vilariño, Nicanor Parra, Marosa di Giorgio and Malú Urriola in journals such as The Paris Review, BOMB, and Harvard Review. Before earning her PhD, she worked in theater and collaborated as a dramatist with the contemporary dance and theater company, Il Balletto di Spoleto. Her plays, La straniera and Tela di ragno, have been performed in Italy and Spain. Currently Deeny Morales is writing a book about the poetic structures of solitude and history in Latin America.
BOUQUET OF WRITERS
Nancy Naomi Carlson won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Author of seventeen titles (twelve translated), her work has been noted in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Ms. Magazine. A recipient of two translation grants from the NEA and decorated by the French government with the Academic Palms, she’s a translations editor for On the Seawall and Pleiades. Translating Alain Mabanckou’s Congo (Seagull Books, 2027) is her latest project.
Sahar Choudhury writes from Leesburg, Virginia. They are a Bangladeshi-American poet, an MFA student at George Mason University, and a reader for Poetry Daily. Sahar's work appears or is forthcoming in Dunes Review, the Mid-Atlantic Review, and Rowayat, among others.
Matthew Clayfield is an Australian journalist, travel writer, and criminally unpublished novelist. He has filed from more than thirty countries, covering politics, conflict, human rights, climate change, and, uh, books. He dislikes writing about himself in the third person.
Noa Cohen is a queer Israeli-American poet. She is an MFA candidate at George Mason University, and is the current managing editor of phoebe journal as well as a teaching fellow for Poetry Alive!. Her poems have appeared in Write-Haus and Tel Aviv University’s Caesura. She was the 2024 recipient of the Bar Sagi Award for Creative Writing, and the 2026 runner-up of George Mason University’s Rinehart Poetry award.
Heather Green is the author of the poetry collection No Other Rome and the translator of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won. She teaches as an Assistant Professor in the School of Art at George Mason University, most recently at Mason Korea.
Benjamin Inks earned a Purple Heart in Afghanistan and an MFA at George Mason University. He combined these experiences by writing the military short story collection Soft Targets, which was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2023. He lives and works in Northern Virginia.
Sylvie Kandé is the author of three collections of poetry published by Gallimard. Lagon, lagunes. Tableau de Mémoire [Lagoons. Memory Board](2000) is postfaced by Edouard Glissant. La quête infinie de l’autre rive : épopée en trois chants (2011) received the 2017 Prix Lucienne Gracia-Vincent under the auspices of Fondation Saint John Perse and was published as Die Unendliche Suche nach dem Anderen Ufer by Matthes & Seitz (2021), and by Wesleyan U. Press as The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore. An Epic in Three Cantos (2022). Gestuaire (2016) received the 2017 Prix Louise Labé. It is anthologized as Stiller Tausch (Lyrik Kabinett by Hanser, 2023) and appeared in English as Gestuary (Seagull Books, 2026).
Kandé’s poetry appeared in various journals and anthologies, notably in Poésie du Louvre (Seghers) republished by the New York Review of Books (At the Louvre October 24). She is the recipient of a Golden Dozen teaching Award from NYU where she built the Francophone literature program, and a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. She was recently made The Léopold Sédar Senghor International Academy’s Faculty of Honor & Permanent Member.
Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is the author of Lines of Flight and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores connections between translation and migration. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Two Lines, Chimurenga, and more. She has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation, Bard College, and Bucknell University. She received an M.Phil in Comparative Literature from New York University. She worked for several years for the Bard Prison Initiative and currently teaches translation in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. She is at work on a book about landscape, poetry, painting and belonging titled Vale of Cashmere.
Judy Leserman is a poet and writer living in New York City. Her chapbook length selection, When Spring Could Be Anyone, was selected as the winner of the Aaron Brand Memorial Chapbook Competition and published by Aquila Review in 2024. Judy’s other writings have most recently found gracious homes in Pleiades and Impossible Task, among others. Her writing has been supported by George Mason University’s MFA in poetry, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, which selected her as an international writing fellow to Madagascar in 2023. Judy works as a co-director of Translation Festivals and Programs at the Cheuse Center and as a speech-language pathologist.
CAPT (Ret) Moira G. McGuire is a retired nurse officer with the US Public Health Service who has more than three decades of leadership across federal healthcare systems, national public health initiatives, and integrative wellness programs. As the former Chief of Integrative Health & Wellness at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, she developed and scaled pioneering programs addressing chronic disease, behavioral health, and the care of wounded, ill, and injured service members. As the former Chief of the Arts in Health Program at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, she led the creation of nationally recognized arts and health initiatives, authored operational and evaluation frameworks adopted across federal and civilian platforms, and advised on strategic policy for multiple federal agencies. She is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Florida’s Center for Arts in Medicine and George Mason University’s Arts Management Program. She serves as the Co-Executive Director of the US Public Health Service Music Ensemble, the editorial board of the newly launched Perspectives on Arts in Health journal, and is a board member of the National Organization for Arts in Health. She is currently co-curating Veteran-themed art exhibits entitled Through the Trenches at the Suffolk Center for Cultural Arts and As You Were at George Mason University.
Leeya Mehta is author of ‘Extinction’, a novel (Simon and Schuster, Oct 6, 2026). Her prize-winning poetry, fiction and essays are widely published in the US, India, UK, and Austria, including in the Times of India, Poetry London, and the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets. Her poetry collection is A story of the world before the fence. She is the director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, where she is an award-winning professor and curator at George Mason University. Find more here: https://leeyamehta.com/
Homa Mojadidi is an Afghan American poet and translator. Her poetry manuscript, In Search of the Traceless, is forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asymptote, Washington Square Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Northwest Review. Her work explores themes of loss, exile, memory, and mysticism. Homa holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of North Florida and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, with a concentration in poetry, from George Mason University.
Vivek Narayanan’s honours include a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry as well as fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute and the New York Public Library. His books of poems include After (New York Review Books, 2022) and The Kuruntokai and its Mirror (Hanuman Editions, 2024). His work has appeared in many venues, including Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem. 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 Maria Teresa Ogliastri’s From the Diary of Madame Mao won the 2025 Carnegie Mellon University Press Translation Prize. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus, Tikkun, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Split This Rock’s The Quarry. She has taught writing and translation at The George Washington University, The Writer’s Center, and elsewhere. She lives in Silver Spring, MD. https://www.yvetteneisser.net/
Kian P. Sabti is a queer immigrant writer and translator. Their work centers the relationship between alienation and connection and can be found published or forthcoming in Jarnal, MQR Mixtape, The Windward Review, and elsewhere. They are an MFA candidate at George Mason University and the Poetry Editor of So to Speak.
SAARET E. YOSEPH is a writer and artist from Washington, DC, who blends poetry, documentary and narrative storytelling. Her work has been featured on CNN, HuffPost, Voice of America, The Root and The Ethiopian Reporter. She has received honors and funding support from the National Endowment for the Arts, HumanitiesDC and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her visual docupoem, JOURNEY(S): addis to dc was awarded Best Experimental Film at the 2025 KITFO Film Festival in Los Angeles. She released her debut poetry chapbook, a beginner's guide to endings, in December 2025. Saaret's current project, ABYSSINIA & HARLEM, is a work of historical fiction. The short story collection is inspired by the true story of Dorothy Hadley Bayen, a Black woman from the Midwest who became an Ethiopian princess, against the backdrop of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.
