We're thrilled to announce two forthcoming works of literature in translation. Look out for:
Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Almost Obscene, a collection of poetry translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott, forthcoming in fall 2022. This manuscript was selected from our winter 2020/2021 open reading period for poetry in translation. Warmest thanks to all those who submitted—we were honored to read so many fantastic translations.
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's No One Knows Their Blood Type, a novel translated by Hazem Jamjoum, forthcoming in fall 2024.
Raúl Gómez Jattin (Cartagena, 1945–1997) was one of Colombia’s most outstanding poets—and one of the country’s most controversial literary figures. He spent most of his adult life between psychiatric hospitals, jails, and living as a homeless person. Through it all, he never stopped writing poetry or reciting it on street corners; his instantly famous public readings drew hundreds of listeners. As a queer man of Syrian descent writing in a way that broke with his country’s tradition, his rightful place at the forefront of Colombian poetry has long been denied. In 1997, he was tragically killed by a bus.
Almost Obscene is Gómez Jattin’s English-language debut. It includes work culled from his sporadic chapbooks, written from 1980 to 1997, showcasing a jaggedness of tone, approach, and mind space—precisely the unpredictability that made Gómez Jattin an uncomfortable presence within mainstream Colombian literary circles. Ranging widely in content and form, what unites these poems is the uninhibited expression of a marginalized poetic voice; a decolonizing queerness that challenges the heteronormative as it defies the West’s narrow definitions of queer poetics.
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Managing Editor for Action Books. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. More information at: www.katherinemhedeen.com
Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (Eulalia Books, 2020), which was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (Kenning Editions, 2018). She curates Poesía en acción on the Action Books blog and her writing on translation has appeared in Kenyon Review, Latin American Literature Today, Reading in Translation, and Words Without Borders. Her translation of Lauri García Dueñas’s “0” was recently named a winner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets and Words Without Borders Poems in Translation Contest. She is a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Fellow in Spanish at Kenyon College and a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Born in 1980 in Lebanon, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is an Arabic-language Palestinian novelist, poet, and children’s book author. She has published four novels: Grains of Sugar (House of Poetry, 2004), Threshold of Heavy Spirit (Ogarit, 2011), No One Knows Their Blood Type (Dar Al-Adab, 2013), and Glitter (Dar Al-Mutawassit, 2021). She has also published several children’s books, including A Blue Pond of Questions, which was translated into English and published by Penny Candy Books in 2017. She is the editor of The Book of Ramallah, a collection of short stories from and about Ramallah, published by Comma Press in 2021. She has published four collections of poetry: The Book of Fear (Dar KMN, 2021), Home Dresses and Wars (Dar Al-Ahlyah, 2016), This Smile, That Heart (Dar Raya, 2012), and What She Said about Him (House of Poetry & Qattan Foundation, 2007). A volume of her poetry has been translated into German and published as Ich verbrenne die Zeit (I Burn Time, published by Sujet Verlag in 2018), and an English translation of her poetry is forthcoming in fall 2022 from Milkweed Editions under the title You Can Be the Last Leaf (translated by Fady Joudah).
Hazem Jamjoum is a cultural historian completing his doctorate at New York University, and an audio curator and archivist at the British Library.
No One Knows Their Blood Type is a novel of identity, belonging, and conflicting truths—of stories, secrets, songs, rumors, and lies. On the day that her father dies, Jumana makes a discovery about her blood type. Hers could not have been inherited from her father—the father she sometimes longed for, but always despised. This extraordinary novel centers its Palestinian narrative not on the battlefield of history, but on how women live every day in their bodies, and the colonial context of their embodied lives. With humor and exhilarating inventiveness, it asks: why aren’t questions of love, friendship, parenthood, and desire at the core of our conversations about liberty and freedom? How would that transform our ideas of resistance?
