Join authors from all corners of the globe this fall as they discuss And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the COVID-19 Pandemic. Available in paperback August 25, this anthology of hope sheds light on what life was like for writers, poets, and artists when the world shut down. With contributions from more than thirty countries, the collection offers a truly international perspective to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Proceeds from And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again will go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helps the passionate booksellers we readers depend upon keep their doors open.
This post will be updated as more events are confirmed.
August 11: Rajiv Mohabir at NYC’s Tenement Museum
August 18: André Naffis-Sahely, Jane Hirshfield & Mona Kareem at NYC’s Tenement Museum
September 10: Gábor T. Szántó & Paul Olchváry at Malaprop's (Asheville, NC). Purchase And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again from Malaprop's here.
September 15: Ana Simo, Khalid Alba & Nadia Christidi at the Center for Fiction (Brooklyn, NY). Purchase And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again from the Center for Fiction here.
November 1: Eduardo Halfon & Andrés Neuman at Powell’s Books (Portland, OR). More details to come. Purchase And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again from Powell’s Books here.
About the Participants
© Jordan Miles
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award. His memoir Antiman, winner of the 2019 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, is forthcoming from Restless Books (2021). He is an assistant professor of poetry at Emerson College and the translations editor at Waxwing Journal.
André Naffis-Sahely is the author of the collection The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017) and the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He is the 2020 Author in Residence at UCLA and he lives in Los Angeles.
© Curt Richter
Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine much-honored books of poetry, most recently Ledger (Knopf, 2020). She has also written two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015), and edited and co-translated four books collecting world poets of the past. Her poems appear in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
© Poetry International
Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. Her most recent publication Femme Ghosts is a trilingual chapbook published by Publication Studio in Fall 2019. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and appear in Brooklyn Rail, Ambit, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. Kareem holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Kareem’s English translation of Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award in 2016 and was reprinted by English PEN in 2017. Her selected translations of Iraqi poet Ra’ad Abdul Qader will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Spring 2021. She is currently translating Octavia Butler’s Kindred to Arabic, to be released by Takween publishing in Fall 2020.
© Laszlo Vegh
Gábor T. Szántó (1966, Budapest) novelist, essayist, editor-in-chief of Szombat (www.szombat.org), Hungarian Jewish Magazine. Author of several novels and collections of short stories some of which have also been published in Germany, Russia, Turkey, and is coming out soon in Italy, China and the Czech Republic.
His short story Homecoming, 1945 has been developed into the feature film 1945 that Szántó was one of the screenwriters of. The film won 20 international prizes and was sold to 40 countries.
© Sándor Jászberényi
Paul Olchváry has translated more than ten books from Hungarian, including György Dragomán's novel The White King (Houghton Mifflin) and Károly Pap's novel Azarel (Steerforth), and has received translation awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, and Hungary's Milán Füst Foundation. His shorter translations have appeared in The Paris Review, The Hungarian Quarterly, and turnrow. A native of Amherst, New York, he lives both in Kismaros, Hungary, and various reaches of the American Northeast.
Romanian-born and Qatari-raised, Sudanese artist and political cartoonist Khalid Albaih is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he is the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) PEN Artist-in- Residence. His cartoons have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, NPR, and the BBC. His commentary is published in the Guardian, CNN, and Al Jazeera.
© K. Cogswell
Ana Simo is the author of a dozen plays, a short feature film, and countless articles. A New Yorker most of her life, she was born and raised in Cuba. Forced to leave the island during the political/homophobic witch-hunts of the late 1960s, she first immigrated to France, where she studied with Roland Barthes and participated in early women’s and gay/lesbian rights groups. In New York next, she co-founded Medusa’s Revenge theatre, the direct action group the Lesbian Avengers, the national cable program Dyke TV, and the groundbreaking The Gully online magazine, offering queer views on everything. Heartland, her first novel, was published by Restless Books in 2018. It was a finalist for the 2019 Triangle Lit Awards for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.
© Scott Davis
Nadia Christidi is a researcher, writer, and arts practitioner based between Cambridge, MA and Beirut, Lebanon. Nadia is currently a PhD candidate in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, where she studies how cities that face water supply challenges, which are expected to intensify with climate change, are imagining, planning, and preparing for the future of water. The cites she focuses on are Los Angeles, Dubai, and Cape Town. Her work has been exhibited at Beirut Art Center, SALT Galata (Istanbul), and SALT Ulus (Ankara), and published by ArteEast and ArtAsiaPacific.
© Kevin Gutting
Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."
© Ferrante Ferranti
Eduardo Halfon is the author of fourteen books of fiction published in Spanish. His latest, Mourning, published in English by Bellevue Literary Press in 2018, received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award (US), the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France), and the Premio de las Librerías de Navarra (Spain). In 2018, he was awarded the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature, his country’s highest literary honor. He currently lives in Paris and holds a fellowship from Columbia University.
© Magadalena Siedlecki
Andrés Neuman (1977) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he spent his childhood. The son of Argentine émigré musicians, he lives in Granada, Spain. He has a degree in Spanish Philology from the University of Granada, where he taught Latin American literature. He was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was included on the Bogotá-39 list. He is the author of numerous novels, short stories, poems, aphorisms, and travel books. His first novel translated into English, Traveler of the Century (FSG), won the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, and was selected among the books of the year by El País, El Mundo, The Guardian, The Independent, and Financial Times; it was also shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and received a Special Commendation from the jury of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His second novel translated into English, Talking to Ourselves (FSG), was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and for the Best Translated Book Award, shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and selected as the best book of the year by Typographical Era. His collection of short stories The Things We Don’t Do (published by Open Letter) was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and won the Firecracker Award for fiction, given by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses with the American Booksellers Association. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages.
Edited by Ilan Stavans
In this rich, eye-opening, and uplifting anthology, dozens of esteemed writers, poets, artists, and translators from more than thirty countries send literary dispatches from life during the pandemic. A portion of proceeds benefit booksellers in need.
World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translation of 2020
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632063021
Publication date: Aug 25, 2020