poetry translation

Dona Roşu, a Romanian-born poet, essayist, journalist, and translator, lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Deborah Ann Percy, who lives in Kalamazoo and South Haven, MI, earned the MFA in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University. Her chapbook of short fiction, Cool Front, appeared in 2010 from March Street Press, and a full-length collection, Invisible Traffic, is forthcoming in Fall 2014 from One Wet Shoe Press. Her plays, and those written in collaboration with her husband, Arnold Johnston, have won awards, publication, and production nationwide.

Arnold Johnston lives in Kalamazoo and South Haven, MI. Cofounder of Western Michigan University’s creative writing program and founder of its playwriting program, he taught in the WMU Department of English for many years and served for ten years as its chair. His plays, and others written in collaboration with his wife, Deborah Ann Percy, have won awards, production, and publication across the country. His poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translations have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies.

Georg Trakl (1887 – 1914) was born in Salzburg, Austria, and seems to have been suicidal in childhood. As an extremely young child, he threw himself first in front of a galloping horse and then in front of a train. When both of those suicide attempts failed, he tried drowning himself in a lake and was rescued only when someone noticed his hat floating away. His adolescence and adulthood were marked by bouts of serious mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, a supposed incestuous relationship with his sister, and near-constant failure.

Jay Hopler’s poetry, essays, and translations have appeared most recently, or are forthcoming, in Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, Interim, Plume, and The Literary Review. Green Squall, his first book of poetry, won the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His most recent book is Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (edited with Kimberly Johnson, Yale University Press, 2013). The recipient of numerous honors including fellowships and awards from the Great Lakes Colleges Association, the Lannan Foundation, the Mrs.

Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė (b. 1954) is a native of Kaunas, Lithuania, with a degree from the Kaunas campus of Vilnius University. She was the 2013 Poezijos Pavasaris [Poetry Spring] Laureate, which is Lithuania’s equivalent of the US Poet Laureate position. She has published more than a dozen collections of her poetry and has been honored with the Zigmas Gelė prize, the Moteris prize, the Kauno Diena award, and several grants from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture.

Rima Krasauskytė grew up in Klaipeda, Lithuania. She earned a B.A. in English Philology from Vilnius Pedagogical University (now called “Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences”) and an MA in English from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Her co-translations from Lithuanian, with Julie Kane, of poems by Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė appeared in The Drunken Boat. She has taught English at the Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences and at the Military Academy of Vilnius.