Invitation--Salon June 8th at 12 EST!
Poet Gail Newman & Seth Michelson in a salon about traversing language & time
I’m very excited to host poet Gail Newman, author of Blood Memory, and translator Seth Michelson, who translated The Ghetto by the award-winning Argentine poet Tamara Kamenszain. You can read about Newman’s work here, beginning with the arresting line “my mother came to a dead end called Poland.”
You can read about Michelson’s translations of Kamenszain here. A good place to start would be with the memorable “Kaddish” poem which begins:
What’s a father?
I dream I still have one.
About Gail Newman:
Gail Newman, a child of Holocaust survivors, was born in a Displaced Persons’ Camp in Lansberg, Germany. Her poems have appeared in journals including Nimrod International Journal, Prairie Schooner, and The Atlanta Review and in anthologies including Ghosts of the Holocaust, California Women Poets, and America, We Call Your Name. Her second collection of poetry, Blood Memory, winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, received the 2020 Northern California Authors and Publishers Gold Award for Poetry and the 2021 Best Book Awards in the “Poetry: Religious” category. Gail has worked for California Poets in the Schools as a poet-teacher and San Francisco Coordinator and as a museum educator at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum. She currently teaches Genocide and Holocaust poetry workshops for writers and educators. Gail lives in San Francisco and Sebastopol, CA with her husband.
Tamara Kamenszain.
Tamara Kamenszain (1947-2021) is the author of ten full-length books of original poetry, beginning with De este lado del Mediterráneo (l973) and including most recently El libro de los divanes (2014). She has also published four scholarly books about poetry. To date, her poetry has been translated into Portuguese, Italian, German, and English, and it can be found in anthologies around the world. Her many prizes include a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, a Pablo Neruda Medal of Honor from the President of Chile, two Konex prizes for poetry, a Premio Honorífico José Lezama Lima from the Casa de las Américas in Cuba, and Book of the Year from the Buenos Aires Book Fair for her complete works of poetry (to date): La novela de la poesía.
About Seth Michelson, Translator of The Ghetto
Seth Michelson is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor. He has published thirteen books of poetry and poetry in translation. His books of original poetry include Swimming Through Fire (2017) and Eyes Like Broken Windows (2012). Recent translations include The Red Song (2017; Melisa Machado, Uruguay) and Poems from the Disaster (2016; Zulema Moret, Argentina). He also edited and translated the anthology Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention (2017), after leading poetry workshops for two years in the most restrictive maximum-security detention center in the U.S. for undocumented, unaccompanied youth. He teaches the poetry of the Americas at Washington and Lee University.