Bouquet of Translations at Busboys and Poets in DC

Monday, September 28, 2026 6:00 PM EDT

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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 the kickoff of 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 Indian Tamil and Malayalam language writer and literary critic, 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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.