October 29, 2020 @ 3:00 pm ET
featuring
Jericho Brown, Linda Gregerson, Brenda Shaughnessy, Sandra Meek, Ilya Kaminsky, Mario Chard
and a group of distinguished special guest poets from Germany
This event is made possible in co-operation with Poetry@Tech, Terminus Magazine, Emory University, Westminster School, Berry College, and the Haus für Poesie Berlin.
The event will be broadcast virtually over BlueJeans. As always, the reading is FREE and open to the public. Click on the "Web Stream Information" tab to the right for information about how to join the event.
There will also be a number of other partner events through the week as part of the Poetry Festival, organized by our partner institutions. You can find event details on the "Partner Events" tab to the right or at poetry.gatech.edu/poetry-festival-2020-events.
Summit Participants
Book Orders
As always, A Cappella Books, Atlanta’s oldest independent bookstore will be our official book sales partner for this event. We hope you’ll get a copy or two (or six) of books by our featured poets. See the Book sales tab on the right for more information, or search for the poets on their website by clicking the button below.
Livestream Info
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Poetry@Tech 2020-21 season is going virtual. Which means, not only are our readings FREE and open to the public, as always, but you can attend them from anywhere in the world!
We will use BlueJeans to live broadcast the readings.
To attend the Poetry Festival and Translation Summit on 29 October 2020, follow the instructions below. The event will begin at 3 pm Eastern Time, but our (virtual) doors open at 2:45 pm ET.
Web stream information
Joining the reading is easy - just choose the platform that works best for you, and follow the instructions below:
Join via your Computer’s Web Browser
just click on: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/qukrgawy
- Open the link above
- Download the app if you don’t have it already.
- Enter event ID : qukrgawy
Partner Events
The Atlanta Poetry Festival and Translation Summit is a four-day virtual event, and with a number of events in the week of October 26, 2020:
Monday, October 26, 2020
1:10 PM - 1:50 PM Eastern Time
Sponsored by Westminster Schools
Summit on Translation
with Ronya Othmann, Anja Kampmann, Dagmara Kraus,
Brenda Shaughnessy and Ilya Kaminsky
Moderated by Mario Chard
For more about the event: https://www.westminster.net/about-us/news/news-details/~board/news-events/post/westminster-hosting-international-poetry-panel-and-discussion
Event Information: https://www.westminster.net/about-us/news/news-details/~board/news-events/post/westminster-hosting-international-poetry-panel-and-discussion
Livestream Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXvqomaHbyw
Monday, October 26, 2020
4:00 PM - 5:15 PM Eastern Time
Sponsored by Berry College
A Reading of High as the Waters Rise
authored by Anja Kampmann
and translated from German to English by Anne Posten
Moderated by Sandra Meek
Event Information: https://cal.berry.edu/event/anja_kampmann_and_anne_posten_fiction_reading
Livestream Link: https://berry.zoom.us/j/94540825920
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM Eastern Time
Sponsored by Berry College
Poetry’s Role in a Divisive World: A Conversation
with Jericho Brown, Yevgeniy Breyger, and George Leß
Moderated by Sandra Meek
Event Information: https://cal.berry.edu/event/poetrys_role_in_a_divisive_world_...
Livestream Link: https://berry.zoom.us/j/98115975263
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
6:00 PM Eastern Time
Sponsored by Emory University
Reading and Public Conversation
with Linda Gregerson and Karolina Golimowska (reading for Ulrich Koch), Brenda Shaughnessy and Anja Kampmann
Moderated by Jericho Brown
(Pre-registration Required)
Event Information: https://creativewriting.emory.edu/home/reading_series/Atlanta%20Poetry%20Festival%20and%20Translation%20Summit.html
Livestream Link: https://emory.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qm-3cwhoS6moYFMkxeNr7A
Terminus Special VERSschmuggel Issue
Featuring poems and translations by Jericho Brown, Ilya Kaminsky, Ulrich Koch, Sandra Meek, Dagmara Kraus, Brenda Shaughnessy, and others.
Our latest issue of Terminus, released on 28 October 2020, is a special issue released on the occasion of the Atlanta Poetry Festival and Translation Summit.
Renowned German poets Karolina Golimowska, Alexander Gumz, and Thomas Wohlfahrt join our regular editors, Travis Denton and Katie Chaple as guest editors for this issue. Terminus:VERSschmuggel has 189 pages of poems and translations between English and German, displayed in a unique mirror layout that showcases poetry-in-translation at its finest.
This issue, a striking example of how poetry can act as an urgent bridge between poets separated by culture, language, and oceans is available for free online viewing at https://online.fliphtml5.com/gexnc/erwq/#p=1.
Haus für Poesie
Since its foundation in 1991, the Haus für Poesie (formerly, Literaturwerkstatt Berlin), has been promoting and supporting all areas of literature, but especially poetry, both as the written word and in conjunction with other art forms and media. Its work has focused exclusively on poetry since 2000.
Haus für Poesie brings poets to Germany from all over the world and endeavours to promote German authors abroad. The Haus für Poesie opens up dialogue with the audience, promoting access to poetry and understanding of poetry and its forms among the public.
The Haus für Poesie's web portal, www.lyrikline.org is the world’s biggest online portal for contemporary poetry, and has been awarded the Grimme Online Prize. On the portal, poems can be listened to in their original languages, with translations which can be read alongside. The platform is made possible by a network of partner institutions in more than 50 countries.
Other activities and events organized by Haus für Poesie include:
- The open mike competition in Berlin for young, German-speaking poets and writers, in existence since 1993,
- open poems poetry workshops,
- The annual 10-day long poesiefestival berlin, which is the largest of its kind in Europe,
- VERSschmuggel / reVERSible translation workshops, in which pairs of poets from two different languages translate each other.
- The biennial ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, which brings together poetry films from around the world, and is the only festival of its kind internationally.
as well as other in-house programmes at the Haus für Poesie's event room in the Culture Brewery.
Poets: Atlanta
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
Linda Gregerson
Linda Gregerson is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Prodigal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). She has also written two critical monographs and is co-editor of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia 2011). Her essays on Early Modern English literature and contemporary US literature have been published in many journals and anthologies. Her awards include fellowships and prizes from American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the Modern Poetry Association, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations. She is currently a Professor at the University of Michigan, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Brenda Shaughnessy
Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of five poetry books, including The Octopus Museum (Knopf 2019), a New York Times Notable Book. Recipient of a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.
Sandra Meek
Sandra Meek is the author of six books of poems: Still, forthcoming from Persea Books January 14, 2020; An Ecology of Elsewhere (Persea Books, May 2016); Road Scatter (Persea Books, 2012); Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo 2008); Burn (2005), and Nomadic Foundations (2002), as well as a chapbook, The Circumference of Arrival (2001). She is also the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark 2007), which was awarded a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal.
Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Agni, Terrain.org, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Conjunctions, and The Iowa Review, among others. A recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the 2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has three times been awarded Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, in 2017 for An Ecology of Elsewhere, in 2006 for Burn, and in 2003 for Nomadic Foundations. She has also twice been awarded the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry, for An Ecology of Elsewhere and for Nomadic Foundations.
Meek served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991, where she taught English at Boswelakgosi Junior Secondary School. She is Co-founding Editor of Ninebark Press, Director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College. Born in El Paso, Texas, she grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado. She received her BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University, and a PhD in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Denver. Since 1996, she has lived in Rome, Georgia.
Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books, including The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins, 2010) and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books, 2012).
His work won The Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, Lannan Fellowship, Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK).
Deaf Republic was The New York Times’ Notable Book for 2019, and was also named Best Book of 2019 by dozens of other publications, including Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Irish Times, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Library Journal, and New Statesman.
Ilya's poems have been included in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and translated into over twenty languages. His books are published in many countries, including Turkey, Netherlands, Germany, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain and China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Kaminsky was selected by BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.”
Mario Chard
Mario Chard is the author of Land of Fire (Tupelo Press, 2018), winner of the Dorset Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry.
Recent poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Winner of the “Discovery” Poetry Prize and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Poets: Germany
Ulrich Koch
In his poems, Ulrich Koch (b. 1966 in Winsen an der Luhe) evokes everyday, remote and solitary places which leave a melancholy echo. He lives to the east of Lüneburg and works in Hamburg. His most recent books are Ich im Bus im Bauch des Wals (Edition Azur, 2015) and Selbst in hoher Auflösung (Jung & Jung, 2017).
Along with various fellowships from organizations such as the Förderkreis deutscher Schriftsteller in Baden-Württemberg and the Baden-Württemberg Art Foundation, he has also received the 2007 Promotion Prize of the Stuttgart Writers’ House and the 2011 Hugo Ball Promotion Prize.
Georg Leß
Georg Leß is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, 'Schlachtgewicht' (parasitenpresse, 2013), and 'die Hohlhandmusikalität' (kookbooks, 2019). His work has been published in anthologies and journals, including Akzente, manuskripte, Park and Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, and translated into various languages.
Leß received the GWK Prize for Literature in 2014 and the Promotional Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia for Young Artists in 2016. Leß was born in 1981 in Arnsberg, and lives in Berlin.
Karolina Golimowska
Karolina Golimowska works for Haus für Poesie ('The House of Poetry') in Berlin, Germany, where she is responsible for poetry translation projects, among others, the poetry translation workshop VERSschmuggel/reVERSible. She is the author of short prose and journalistic texts as well as a conference interpreter and translator. Holding a Ph.D. in American Studies, she is also a lecturer at the Freie Universitaet in Berlin.
Anja Kampmann
Anja Kampmann studied at the University of Hamburg and at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig. In 2010, she received a scholarship to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She then worked for the radio, and on a dissertation on silence and musicality in Samuel Beckett's late work. Her poems have been published in magazines such as Akzente, Neue Rundschau, Wespennest and in the anthology Jahrbuch der Lyrik. She received the 2013 MDR literature award and the 2015 Wolfgang Weyrauch sponsorship award at the Leonce and Lena competition in Darmstadt. Her poetry debut 'Proben von Stein und Licht' ('Samples from Stone and Light') was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2016. Her first novel 'Wie hoch die Wasserstieg' ('How high the water rises') won the Mara Cassens Prize for the best German-language debut novel and the Lessing Promotion Prize, and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the German Book Prize in 2018. Anja was born in Hamburg in 1983, and lives in Leipzig.
Dagmara Kraus
Dagmara Kraus was born in Poland and raised there and in Germany. She is the author of seven books of poetry and fiction. Her poetry and translations appear widely, including the poetry collections 'kummerang' (Kookbooks, Berlin, 2012) / 'gloomerang' (Argos Books, New York, 2014) and 'kleine grammaturgie' (Urs Engeler/roughbooks, Solothurn, 2013).
She has received various awards for her work as a poet, including the Erlanger Literature Prize for Poetry in Translation 2017, the Kassel Prize for Comedic Literature 2018 and the Basel Poetry Prize 2018. Most recently, she published the children's book 'alle nase diederdase' (kookbooks 2017) and 'Aby Ohrkranf's HUNCH POEM' (Urs Engeler / roughbooks, 2018).
Yevgeniy Breyger
Yevgeniy Breyger was born in Charkow, Ukraine and moved to Magdeburg, Germany with his family in 1999. He studied Creative Writing and Cultural Journalism at the University of Hildesheim, Literature Writing at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig, and Curatorial Studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule (Academy of Fine Arts Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main.
His debut collection, 'flüchtige monde' ('ephemeral moons', kookbooks, 2016) was selected among the poetry volumes of the year by the Literaturhaus Berlin and among the best poetry debuts of the year by Haus für Poesie. His second volume of poetry, 'gestohlene luft' ('stolen air') is forthcoming from kookbooks in 2020, and is supported by grants from the German Literature Fund and the Herrenhaus Edenkoben.
Breyger's work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Jahrbuch der Lyrik, Lyrik von jetzt 3, Bella triste, and Edit. He was an editor of Tippgemeinschaft, the annual anthology of the students at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut, and the anthology Ansicht der leuchtenden Wurzeln von unten (poetenladen, 2017). His awards include the Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger Literature Prize in 2011, the Munich Poetry Prize (2nd Prize) in 2018, and the Leonce and Lena Prize of the City of Darmstadt in 2019. At the end of 2020, Breyger will start a scholarship at the Writer's House in Stuttgart. Breyger is a member of the poets' collective Salon Fluchtentier. He lives and works in Frankfurt.
Ronya Othmann
Ronya Othmann, born in Munich in 1993, is an author, poet, and journalist. She writes poetry, prose, and essays, and is a member of the GID poetry collective. The daughter of a Kurdish-Yazidi father and a German mother, her work deals with themes of migration, homeland, and war.
Her work has been published in anthologies and magazines such as BELLA Triste, Jahrbuch der Lyrik, TAZ am Wochenende, and LITERATUR SPIEGEL. She is co-editor of the poetry anthology Ansicht der leuchtend Wurzeln von unten (poetenladen, 2017). Together with Cemile Sahin, she writes the Orient Express column in TAZ.
Othmann has received numerous awards for her work, including the Leonhard and Ida Wolf-Memorial Prize of the City of Munich, a residential fellowship at Künstlerhaus Lukas, the MDR Literature Prize, the Caroline Schlegel Prize for Essay, the audience award at the 2019 Ingeborg Bachmann Competition for her text 'Vierundsiebzig' ('Seventy-four') about the genocide of the Yazidis, and the Gertrud Kolmar sponsorship award for her German-language poem 'Ich habe gesehen' ('I have seen'). In 2015, she organized the Kurdish Film Festival in Leipzig and in 2018, she was on the jury of the International Film Festival in Duhok, Kurdistan, Iraq.
Book Sales
As always, A Cappella Books, Atlanta’s oldest independent bookstore will be our official book sales partner for th is event. We hope you’ll get a copy or two (or six) of books by our wonderful featured poets. You can order at the following links:
- Jericho Brown, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) - Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
- Linda Gregerson, Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014 (Mariner Books, 2015)
- Brenda Shaughnessy, The Octopus Museum (Knopf, 2019)
- Sandra Meek, Still:Poems (Persea, 2020)
- Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) - National Book Award Finalist
- Mario Chard, Land of Fire (Tupelo Press, 2018) - Dorset Prize Winner
