International Writers Festival—Translating America From The Outside In and The Inside Out
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 12:00 PM EDT
Art & Design Building, Gillespie Gallery, First Floor, Art Design Bldg, Fairfax
Time and Venue: 12 noon, Art & Design Building, Gillespie Gallery, First Floor, Art and Design Bldg, Fairfax
The Exhibition: 'As you were' is a veteran's exhibition at Gillespie Gallery, and will the space where we will hold this event.
The Panel: Translating America from the outside in and the inside out, {symbolically} in the footsteps of de Tocqueville. a conversation between Carolyn Forché, Fernando Vaverde, Cheuse Spanish writer in residence Marina Pérezagua and Eric Weiner. Moderated by Matthew Clayfield.
More about this day: The tenth anniversary of the Cheuse Center is ongoing and we are excited to bring you our Fall programs. The anniversary year coincides with the 250th Anniversary of America’s independence. To mark this landmark year, the Cheuse Center has developed a program on seeing America from the outside in and the inside out.
Drawing together voices from around the world, we have curated a series of events on September 29th around the theme of Translating America {symbolically} in the footsteps of de Tocqueville. Sometimes dated but always relevant, de Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ is one way of seeing America through one man’s eyes, written in French. But what about other voices, what about other languages, what about other ways of seeing?
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About the writers
Carolyn Forché is the author of Otherwhere: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2026 (Scribner) and five other books of poetry, most recently In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and also Blue Hour (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Angel of History (1995), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Country Between Us (1982), winner of the Lamont Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and Gathering the Tribes (1976), winner of the Yale Series of Young Poets Prize.
She is also the author of a prose book, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), winner of Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” She was one of the first poets to receive the Windham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and in 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award.
She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegría, Robert Desnos, Lasse Söderberg, Fernando Valverde and Mahmoud Darwish. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and in 1990, Lannan Foundation. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an international member of the Royal Society of Literature (UK). She is Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.
Fernando Valverde (Granada, 1980) has been voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities (Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Bologna, Salamanca, UNAM and the Sorbonne).
His books have been published in different countries in Europe and America and translated into several languages. He has received some of the most significant awards for poetry in Spanish, among them the Federico García Lorca, the Emilio Alarcos del Principado de Asturias and the Antonio Machado. His last book, The Insistence of Harm, has been the most-sold book of poetry in Spain for months and has received the Book of the Year award from the Latino American Writers Institute of the City University of New York.
For his collaboration in a work of fusion between poetry and flamenco he was nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2014.
For ten years he has worked as a journalist for the Spanish newspaper El País. He directs the International Festival of Poetry in Granada, one of the most important literary events in Europe, that has received more than 300 authors, including several Nobel Prize laureates. Is professor in University of Virginia (Charlottesville, EEUU).
Cheuse Writer in Residence from Spain, Marina Pérezagua 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.
Eric Weiner is an author, journalist, keynote speaker and writing instructor. His books include the New York Times bestsellers The Geography of Bliss and The Geography of Genius, as well as the critically acclaimed Man Seeks God, The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers and more!
His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Eric is a former aviation reporter for The New York Times and foreign correspondent for NPR. He is the recipient of several journalism and writing awards, including the Angel Award for coverage of Islamic affairs in Asia and the Borders Original Voices Award. Eric’s work has also appeared in the New Republic, The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the anthology "Best American Travel Writing." Eric leads several writing workshops each year, including the Himalayan Writers Workshop and, along with fellow author Jacki Lyden, the Colton House Retreat. He lives in the Washington, DC area with his wife, daughter and a menagerie of animals. He has a popular column on Substack.
Moderator: Matthew Clayfield, visiting writer from Australia
Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic, and screenwriter. He has worked as a freelance foreign correspondent in more than thirty countries, specialising in first-person narrative journalism, political commentary, and travel writing. His popular column, Weariness Makes a Good Mattress is on Substack. His work has appeared in The Australian, The Daily Beast, Politico, The Guardian, The Monthly, and more. He was a staff reporter with The Australian between 2008 and 2010 and a reporter at ABC Radio Current Affairs between 2016 and 2017. He was a shortlisted finalist for Young Journalist of the Year in the 2009 News Limited News Awards. He holds a Bachelor of Film and Television from Bond University and a Masters of Journalism from the University of Queensland.
