Radical Poetry Reading with Forrest Gander

A writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in northern California. His books, often concerned with ecology, include Be With (New Directions 2018) winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, the novel The Trace (New Directions 2014), and Twice Alive, (New Directions, 2021). Gander’s translations and co-translations include Alice Iris Red Horse by Gozo Yoshimasu (New Directions 2016), Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura (Omnidawn 2011), and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems (Copper Canyon Press 2016) He has received grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting and United States Artists Foundations.

Poet Vievee Francis is the author of three poetry collections: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press 2006), Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press 2011), and Forest Primeval (Triquarterly 2015), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. Her fourth book The Shared World is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press in January 2023. Her work has appeared in venues including Poetry magazine, Best American Poetry, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth. She was most recently awarded The Aiken-Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist, and curator Ranjit Hoskote’s seven collections of poetry include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems (Penguin 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton 2018), and Hunchprose (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton 2021). His translation of a 14th-century Kashmiri woman mystic’s poetry has appeared as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics 2011). He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics 2012). Hoskote has been a Fellow of the International Writing Program (IWP), University of Iowa, and writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Munich, and the Polish Institute, Berlin.

Poet and translator based in Northern California, David Shook is the translator of Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Room in Rome (Cardboard House Press 2019), a finalist for the National Translation Award and PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His most recent translation of Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon is released by Deep Vellum Publishing in September 2021.

Poet, translator, and editor, Rosmarie Waldrop’s most recent poetry collections are The Nick of Time, Gap Gardening: Selected Poems, Driven to Abstraction, and Curves to the Apple (New Directions). Her novel The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter was reissued by Dorothy: A Publishing Project in October 2019, and her collected essays, Dissonance (if you are interested) and Keeping the Window Open: Interviews, Statements, Alarms, Excursions are available from University of Alabama Press and Wave Books respectively. She has translated French and German poetry and lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where alongside Keith Waldrop she edited Burning Deck Press from 1961–2017.