Publishing-in-Transit: Centre International de Poésie Marseille

Since the late 1990s, Michaël Batalla has been actively engaged in the poetic scene. He became the director of the Centre international de poésie / Marseille in 2019. Before that, he ran the collection (expériences poétiques), published by Le clou dans le fer between 2002 and 2013. From the 2000s onwards, he became interested in the pedagogies of poetic writings, which he taught at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, from 2010 to 2015. His writings have been published in numerous magazines and books by various publishers.

Abigail Lang is Associate Professor of US literature and translation at Université Paris Cité. She is the author of La Conversation transatlantique (Les presses du réel, 2021), an account of the exchanges between French and US poets after 1968, which Michael Nardone is translating into English. A translator of some twenty volumes of English-language poetry into French, she has written two books with Thalia Field: a performance-essay on Gertrude Stein and naming (A Prank of Georges, Essay Press, 2010) and a spy novel on translation (Leave to Remain. Legends of Janus, Dalkey Archive, 2020), made into an audiobook by Ben Williams. With Vincent Broqua and Olivier Brossard, she curates the long-running Poets & Critics program and the Double Change bilingual reading series.

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, including At Night the States, the double volume Close to Me and Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère, and How Spring Comes, co-winner of the San Francisco Poetry Award. Her epic poem The Descent of Alette was published by Penguin in 1996, followed by Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Notley’s long poem Disobedience won the Griffin International Prize in 2002. Her most recent books of poetry are Early Works, The Speak Angel Series, and For the Ride. Over the years Notley edited/co-edited three poetry journals: CHICAGO, SCARLET, and Gare du Nord.

Poet Cole Swensen is the author of 17 volumes of poetry and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over 20 volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation.