Translations

Kaveh Bassiri

Kaveh Bassiri is an Iranian-American writer and translator. He is the author of 99 Names of Exile, winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and Elementary English, winner of the Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. His poems have been published in the anthologies Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, The Heart of a Stranger, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, and Somewhere We Are Human. His translations have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Chicago Review, Fence, Lana Turner, Colorado Review, and Guernica. Bassiri is the recipient of the 2022-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellowship and a 2019 translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Original author

Rosa Jamali is the leading female experimental poet in Iran. She was part of a bold generation of Persian writers often called the “Poets of the Seventies” (referring to the 1370s in the Iranian calendar, which roughly maps to the 1990s). They rejected established poetic conventions and experimented with language and forms. Jamali is the author of four books of poetry, two collections of selected poems, a book of critical essays, and a play, as well as several books of poetry in translation. Since publishing her first book in 1997, Jamali has attracted a great deal of attention in Iran. Many reviews and essays have been written about Jamali’s work, and she has been invited to read her poetry internationally, including in the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, India, Colombia, and Kosovo.