March 19 (Translation Event, co-sponsored by the Yiddish Book Center): Featuring Jennifer Kronovet & Aviya Kushner, with Merle Bachman & Maia Evrona

Jennifer Kronovet is the author of two poetry collections: The Wug Test (Ecco) and Awayward (BOA). She co-translated The Acrobat (Tebot Bach), by Yiddish writer Celia Dropkin, and, using the name Jennifer Stern, Empty Chairs (Graywolf), by Chinese poet Liu Xia. She edits Circumference Books, a new press for poetry in translation that she founded. Visit Jennifer’s profile in Yetzirah’s Jewish Poets Database.

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb (Orison Books), winner of The Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, a New York Times New & Noteworthy selection, and Foreword INDIES Finalist; and The Grammar of God (Spiegel & Grau), a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and Sami Rohr Prize Finalist. She is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellow in translation.

Merle Lyn Bachman, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who came to New York around 1912, grew up in Albany, NY. A poet who delights in writing prose and exploring the arbitrary boundaries between genres, Bachman has published a scholarly monograph, two poetry chapbooks, two full-length poetry books, and an anthology (with co-editor Anthony Rudolf of London) featuring selected poems of the Scottish-Jewish poet A. C. Jacobs. Her latest book is the hybrid-genre Thank You for Being: A Poet’s Memoir of Home. Her translation of selections of Rosa Nevadovska’s Yiddish—poetry is forthcoming in 2023. Visit Merle’s profile in Yetzirah’s Jewish Poets Database.

Maia Evrona is a poet, prose writer, and translator of Yiddish (and occasionally Spanish) literature. Originally from Massachusetts, she grew up with a serious illness. She was accepted into the Bennington Writing Seminars at the age of twenty, without a bachelor’s degree, after having been too ill to attend high school and college. Her poetry has been supported with two joint Fulbright Scholar Awards to Spain and Greece, while her translations have received fellowships from the NEA, ALTA and the Yiddish Book Center, where she was a 2019 Translation Fellow. She has been characterized as a representative of a “new generation of Yiddish poet-translators.”

Gratitude to Our Event Co-Sponsor: