Attending AWP? Check out Katherine E. Young’s Panel on Women in Translation
"This panel of poet-translators working in Catalan, French, and Russian focuses on the systems of exclusion that permeate the literary culture in this country and the role of translators in amplifying these voices."
Join professional translators Katherine E. Young, Aviya Kushner, Nancy Naomi Carlson, Sharon Dolin, and Andrea Jurjević as they discuss "systems of exclusion which permeate literary culture." This panel at AWP is an important one for Katherine E. Young who has historically translated Russian-language authors experiencing oppression. Her latest translation, Anna Starobinets' Look at Him, is a memoir recounting the treatment of a young woman carrying a terminally ill child.
Katherine E. Young's poetry also contends with gender issues and advocates for female empowerment. Her latest collection, Woman Drinking Absinthe, places the struggles and triumphs of women in historical and modern contexts. The women of these poems, from the naïf who willfully ignores evidence of Bluebeard’s crimes to Manet’s dispirited barmaid at the Folies-Bergère, brush off convention at their peril, even though convention imperils their bodies, their spirits, and their art.
This panel is available to all attendees of the all-digital 2021 AWP conference.
The World of Yesterday (Armistice Day, 2018)
My father always said that his first memory was of standing on the couch in his parent’s living room, small hands on the back cushion, peering out a picture widow at a neighborhood street in Bend, Oregon. There is a slow-moving line of cars and horse-drawn carriages inching its way down the lane. The line of cars is there every day, and every day he stands there and watches. His street is a long one and at the end of it is the cemetery. He is not allowed to go outside to play. Death is all anyone talks about. Death from a great flu epidemic. Death from a great war just ending. Everyone has lost someone. Most have lost a few. It is 1918…
Linda Watanabe McFerrin Interviewed for Author Matthew Felix’s Video Podcast
Author and poet Linda Watanabe McFerrin sat down with Matthew Felix, himself an author of some renown, for Matthew’s video podcast this last weekend. What follows is an in-depth, thoughtful, and often irreverent look at writing, life, travel, and zombies. And more, we get to hear many of the juicy details on Linda’s new Legacy Book due out from ASP in Autumn 2019…
Fact or Fiction
…And so it is for me, as I send an invented “namesake” into worlds I know vicariously but haven’t lived—Hollywood and hippies, communes and con artists, Woodstock and the Summer of Love. In the opening of Melanie’s Song, J.J. is poised at the edge of the Pacific reflecting on where she has been and where she is going. She is endowed with a deep and spiritual connection to a native place we share, but I am also setting her free to fly into her own undiscovered territory.