International Writers Festival 2025 | Busboys and Poets Books
Date and Time
Sep 29, 2025 6:00 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
Sep 29, 2025 6:00 pm
14th & V
Join a bouquet of literary translators and multilingual writers for a kaleidoscopic reading and gathering
If you throw a flower in another language into the air, who will catch it?
Let’s make a bouquet together in many languages!
Please join us for a Big Tent Community Event, a chance to convene and bring together literary translators and multilingual writers in the DMV for a kaleidoscopic reading and gathering.
The night will start off with a conversation between Marta Sanz & Katie King, followed by a book signing for their latest release My Clavicle. Then, we’ll hear from poet and translator Peter Cole, followed by a bouquet of local writers reading their translations in English from many languages, including: English, Hindi, Tamil, Polish, Faroese, Spanish, Russian, Kosovo, Ukrainian, Croatian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and more! Copies of My Clavicle along with Peter Cole’s latest translation On the Slaughter and some of his most recent books will be available for purchase. All participating writers will be signing books after the program.
This event is free and open to all. Doors open at 5:30, and our program begins at 6:00 pm. There will be full dinner service throughout the program. Books will be available for purchase before, during, and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books
Marta Sanz is an award-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and scholar, and one of Spain's most celebrated contemporary writers. With a literary career spanning more than two decades, she has published fifteen novels and essay collections, including Los mejores tiempos (Debate, 2001), winner of the Ojo Crítico Prize for Fiction; Animales domésticos (Destino, 2003); and Susana y los viejos (Destino, 2006), which was a finalist for the 2006 Nadal Prize. Her recent works include Farándula (2015); Círculo de lectores (2016), winner of the Herralde Prize for the Novel; Clavícula (2017); and Pequeñas mujeres rojas (2020), a crime novel that appeals to collective memory, all published by Anagrama. Sanz holds a PhD in philology and is a critic for the El País literary supplement and for the magazine Mercurio. She was editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine Ni hablar and wrote for periodical publications like ABC and Viento Sur. Incredibly, while she has been published broadly in the Spanish-language world, My Clavicle marks her debut in English language translation. My Clavicle will be published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Akoya Press.
Katie King is a journalist and literary translator with a PhD in Hispanic Studies. Her translations of Spanish poetry and prose have been published in Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, Columbia Journal, Translation Review, and The Spanish Riveter and in print anthologies published by Graywolf Press and Ecco Press. Her full-length book translations include Someone Speaks Your Name by Luis García Montero, director of Spain's Cervantes Institute, published by Swan Isle Press in January 2023, One Year and Three Months, also by García Montero, forthcoming from Vaso Roto in September 2025, and My Clavicle, by Spanish novelist Marta Sanz, forthcoming from Unnamed Press in July 2025. As a foreign correspondent and editor, Katie has lived and worked in London, New York, Madrid, Mexico City and Sao Paulo and traveled extensively in Spain and Latin America. She lives in Washington, DC.
Peter Cole's most recent books include Draw Me After: Poems; That Simple?... and That Complicated: Conversations on Poetry and Translation; and Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. Among his collections of translations are The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 and The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition, as well as contemporary poetry and fiction by Aharon Shabtai, Taha Muhammad Ali, Yoel Hoffmann, Harold Schimmel, and others. Cole has received numerous honors for his work, among them an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the PEN Translation Prize, fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, a National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
BOUQUET OF WRITERS:
Rohan Chhetri is a poet, translator, and editor currently based in Houston, TX. His latest book is Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful. A recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant for translation, his translation of the Nepali poet Avinash Shrestha's selected poems, The Dust Draws its Face on the Wind, was published in 2024 by HarperCollins India. His poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, among others.
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski (b. 1984) – writer, musician, activist, and academic. His work focuses on history, memory, and ethics. He is the author of several books published and translated in the United States, Germany, France, Greece, and Slovenia. He is the current Artist-in-Residence at Yale University and the curator of the series What About Exclusion? and Virus of Hate at the University of Oxford.
Randi Ward is a poet, translator, lyricist, and photographer from West Virginia. Her translations of Faroese poetry have twice won the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Prize. In 2024, the government of the Faroe Islands honored Ward with Heiðursgáva Landsins, a national award for distinguished service to Faroese culture.
Katherine E. Young is the author of two poetry collections, Day of the Border Guards and Woman Drinking Absinthe, and editor of Written in Arlington. Her translations of Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Russian, and Ukrainian writers have received international recognition. From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Arlington, VA.
Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems include The Kuruntokai and its Mirrorand After. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetryand elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA Poetry program at George Mason University.
Roman Kostovski is a publisher, writer, and literary translator. He has translated poetry and prose from nine languages into English, with work in Poet Lore and Absinthe. He has published three books of prose, one of poetry, and an album of bard poetry, received a 2017 NEA Translation Fellowship, and founded Washington, D.C.–based Plamen Press in 2014.
Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and translator working from Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian (BCMS). She cofounded Turkoslavia, a collective and journal dedicated to publishing translations from Turkic and Slavic languages, loosely defined. She holds a PhD in comparative literature.
Mujib Mehrdad is an award-winning poet, journalist, writer, and translator, and formerly lectured at Albirony University. His published works include one novel, four poetry collections, and a volume of essays. He currently serves as an editorial associate at LinkedIn.
Homa Mojadidi is an Afghan American poet and translator. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Washington Square Review, One Art, Beyond Words, Blue Mountain Review, and Mudlark. Homa has an M.A. in English Literature from the University of North Florida and an M.F.A. in creative writing from George Mason University.
Marguerite Feitlowitz has published five volumes of translations from French and Spanish, most recently Night, by Ennio Moltedo, Pillar of Salt: An Autobiography with Nineteen Erotic Sonnets, by Salvador Novo, and plays by Griselda Gambaro. She is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture.
Yvette Neisser is an award-winning poet, Spanish translator, and founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT). Her co-translation of Venezuelan poet María Teresa Ogliastri’s “From the Diary of Madame Mao” won the Carnegie Mellon University Press Translation Prize and is forthcoming in 2026.
Sergio Waisman has translated fiction by Mariano Azuela, Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer, Juana Manuela Gorriti, and Nataniel Aguirre, and, in collaboration with Yaki Setton, poetry by Mirta Rosenberg, Muriel Rukeyser, and C.D. Wright. He is the author of Borges and Translation and the novels Leaving and El encargo.
Jona Colson is Queer poet, educator, and translator. His poetry collection, Said Through Glass, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. He is also the translator of Aguas/Waters by Miguel Avero and the co-editor of This Is What America Looks Like: Poetry and Fiction from D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (2021). His poems, translations, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, LitHub, and elsewhere. He is co-president of Washington Writers’ Publishing House and edits the bi-weekly journal, WWPH Writes. He is a professor of ESL at Montgomery College and lives in Washington, D.C. www.jonacolson.com
Judy Leserman (she/ her) is a poet and translator living in New York City and is the author of the chapbook When Spring Could Be Anyone (2024). She is the co-director of literary translation programs for the Cheuse Center and is an editorial reader for Poetry Daily. In addition to her work at the Cheuse Center, Judy also studies Talmud at Yeshivat Maharat.
