January 18: Translation Event with Donna Spruijt-Metz & Lucas Hirsch and Marcela Sulak & Sharron Hass

A unique opportunity to listen to two poets and their translators read from their new books and talk about the creative process of literary translation featuring Donna Spruijt-Metz & Lucas Hirsch and Marcela Sulak & Sharron Hass.

Donna Spruijt-Metz’s debut poetry collection was General Release from the Beginning of the World (2023, Free Verse Editions). Her second collection, To Phrase a Prayer for Peace, is forthcoming (3/25/25, Wildhouse Press). She is an emeritus psychology professor, MacDowell fellow, rabbinical school drop-out, and former classical flutist. Her chapbooks include Slippery Surfaces, And Haunt the World (with Flower Conroy). and Dear Ghost (winner, Harbor Review Editor’s prize).  She lived in the Netherlands for 22 years and translates Dutch poetry. Her poems and translations appear or are forthcoming at The Academy of American Poets, and in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has taught poetry workshops focusing on Psalms and other biblical texts for Hudson Valley Writer’s Center and for Temple Israel of Hollywood. Her collaborative book with Flower Conroy, And Scuttle My Balloon, is forthcoming from Pictureshow Press in 2025. Her translations from the Dutch of Lucas Hirsch’s Wu Wei Eats an Egg is forthcoming from Ben Yehuda press, also in 2025. Her website is https://www.donnasmetz.com

Lucas Hirsch (1975) has a MA in American Studies from the University of Amsterdam and is the author of five collections of poems, familie gebiedt (De Arbeiderspers, 2006), tastzin (De Arbeiderspers, 2009) and Dolhuis (De Arbeiderspers, 2012), Ontsla me van alles wat ik liefheb (De Arbeiderspers, 2015) and Wu wei eet een ei (De Arbeiderspers, 2020). Hirsch published his poems in (several) Dutch, Belgian and American magazines (Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Literary Review) and performed on stages in The Netherlands, India, Belgium and the USA. In May 2011 and May 2016 Lucas Hirsch was a guest at the Ledig House, international writers residency at Art Omi, New York. Hirsch was a guest teacher at Columbia University in 2012 and 2016. He also developed a poetry game app called Puzzling Poetry. It was presented at the 2016 Buchmesse in Frankfurt. It was followed by a children’s edition called Puzzling Poetry Schatkist in 2018. Hirsch teaches creative writing at High Schools around The Netherlands and gives workshops to aspiring poets. In December 2017 he was writer in residency at Sangam House – Nrityagram,India. In February 2019 his debut novel: De Weinigen (Of de bankier in de buik van het beest) was published.

Hirsch currently is working on his sixth book of poetry Kintsugi (September 2025) and recently (2022) published novel called Shotgun Wedding – a novel about mourning and friendship.

Marcela Sulak’s translations from the Czech include Karel Hynek Macha’s May and K. J. Erben’s A Bouquet of Czech Folktales, from the Hebrew Twenty Girls to Envy Me. The Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, nominated for the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and from the French, Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha’s Bela-Wenda. Voices from the Heart of Africa). Sulak has published five collection of poetry, most recently, The Fault; the National Jewish Book Award finalist, City of Skypapers (2021); and the lyric memoir Mouth Full of Seeds (2020). She’s co-edited the 2016 Rose Metal Press title, Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, Sulak edits the Ilanot Review and directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

Sharron Hass was born in Tel Aviv in 1966, and, book after book, she has expanded the possibilities for thinking and writing in Hebrew-language poetry, from erotic relationships between women, and troubled mother-daughter bonds, to how we deploy metaphors such as “light” for goodness and knowledge. This translated volume contains Hass’s fifth collection, Music of the Wide Lane, in its entirety, along with two major poems from her Daylight, her fourth.

For her ground-breaking work, Hass has been awarded Israel’s highest literary accolades: the Hezy Leskly Award and the Art Council Prize for her 1997 debut The Mountain Mother is Gone; the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry for The Stranger and the Everyday Woman (2001); The Bialik Prize for Daylight (2011), and The Dolitsky Prize and the Amichai Poetry Prize for Music of the Wide Lane (2015).

 To date, only one book-length essay in verse, The Day After: an Essay on Sophocles’ Farewell to Poetry, appears in complete English translation.  In 2022 excerpts of eight poems (16 pages) from Hass’s first three books will appear in a three-poet collection with Zephyr Press, translated by Tzippi Keller