Lawrence Schimel
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Lawrence Schimel is a bilingual (Spanish/English) author and anthologist who has published over 120 books in different genres, for readers of all ages.
His books have won the Lambda Literary Award (twice), the Crystal Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and a White Raven from the International Youth Library in Munich, and have been chosen for IBBY’s Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities three times, among other honors.
He is the editor of the anthologies Found Tribe: Jewish Coming Out Stories (Sherman Asher), Kosher Meat (Sherman Asher), PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions about Gender and Sexuality (with Carol Queen; Cleis), First Person Queer (with Richard Labonté; Arsenal Pulp Press), The Future is Queer (with Richard Labonté; Arsenal Pulp Press), etc.
He is the author of one poetry collection in Spanish, Desayuno en la cama (Egales), and two chapbooks written in English, Deleted Names and Fairy Tales for Writers (both A Midsummer Night’s Press); three short story collections written in English and one in Spanish, Una barba para dos (Dos Bigotes); a graphic novel; and over 60 children’s books, including Early One Morning (Orca), Bedtime, Not Playtime! (Orca), Read a Book with Me (Beaming Books), If You Were a Kid Building a Pyramid (Scholastic), Little Pirate Goes to Bed (Innovative Kids), etc.
In addition to his own writing, he is a prolific literary translator, contributing regularly to Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, Latin American Literature Today, Pleiades, Guernica, Círculo de poesía, and other journals.
Into Spanish he has translated works such as the graphic novel They Called Us Enemy by George Takei (Top Shelf); poetry collection Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (Arrebato) and Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma (Flores Raras, with Arrate Hidalgo); and the essays The Art of Cruelty and Bluets both by Maggie Nelson (Tres Puntos).
Recent poetry book translations into English include the poetry collections: Destruction of the Lover by Luis Panini (Pleiades Press), Bomarzo by Elsa Cross (Shearsman), Impure Acts by Ángelo Néstore (Indolent Books, finalist for the Thom Gunn Award), I Offer My Heart as a Target by Johanny Vázquez Paz (Akashic, winner of the Paz Prize), Itinerary of Forgetting by Nelson Simón (Skull & Wind) and Hatchet by Carmen Boullosa (White Pine, winner of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation).
With Layla Benitez-James, he won a 2022 NEA Translation Fellowship to translate Hija del camino by Lucía Asué Momío Rubio into English.
He has been a mentor for the Yiddish Book Center’s Translation Fellowship three times.
Published Works
Poetry
Deleted Names (US: A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2013)
Desayuno en la Cama (Spain: Egales, 2008)
Fairy Tales for Writers (US: A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2007)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Education
BA, Yale University, 1993