Chosen Tongue
A podcast about translingual writers and their journeys.
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Heidi Marjamäki: There is no such thing as good enough
07/13/2025
Heidi Marjamäki: There is no such thing as good enough
My guest today is Heidi Marjamäki, a Finnish author based in Berlin. She studied in Scotland, worked in Oxford and London, and now serves as Associate Fiction Editor at Okay Donkey. Heidi's stories have appeared in ergot., Crow & Cross Keys, and others. She won the 2022 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award and a 2023 ThrillPit mentorship. We discussed writing in a second language, the influence of her Finnish heritage, and the creative freedom found in Berlin’s literary community. Heidi also spoke about translingual storytelling, her editorial work, and the value of embracing mistakes in the writing process.
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Sneha Subramanian Kanta: The Cartography of Language
07/06/2025
Sneha Subramanian Kanta: The Cartography of Language
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a poet, academic, and editor born in Mumbai and based in Mississauga, Canada. She’s the author of five chapbooks and the 2025 Woodhaven Artist in Residence at the University of British Columbia. Her collection Hiraeth, an honouree for the Bronwen Wallace Award, was published by Apple Books and Penguin Random House Canada. Her work has been supported by Tin House, Granta, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and others. We discussed her journey as a bilingual poet writing in English and Hindi, the emotional weight of ancestral exile, and the cultural memory that shapes her work. She spoke about translating her own poems, navigating identity across languages, and offered advice to writers working between linguistic worlds.
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Lidija Hilje: Doubting and doing it anyway
06/29/2025
Lidija Hilje: Doubting and doing it anyway
Lidija Hilje is a Croatian writer and book coach. After earning a law degree, she spent a decade practicing in Croatian courts before transitioning to writing and coaching—this time in English, her second language. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and other publications. She lives in Zadar, Croatia, with her husband and two daughters. Her debut novel, Slanting Towards the Sea, will soon be published by Simon & Schuster in the US and Daunt Books in the UK. In this episode, we discussed Lidija's journey from law to literature, the shift from writing in Croatian to English, and the cultural expectations that shape storytelling. She spoke about the evolution of her novel, the complexities of translation, and the imposter syndrome she sometimes faces as a non-native English writer.
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Leila Farjami: Persian is the river, English the sea
06/22/2025
Leila Farjami: Persian is the river, English the sea
Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist based in Los Angeles. After nearly three decades of writing in Persian, she has in recent years turned her focus to poetry in English—a shift shaped by her experiences of censorship, exile, and a search for expressive freedom. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Mississippi Review, The Penn Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She’s the recipient of The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award in poetry and has been recognized as a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize and the Perugia Press Prize. We discussed the complexities of writing across languages, the emotional labour of translation, and how her poetry navigates identity, displacement, and heritage. Leila also shared how her work honours her ancestors and what it means to write as a woman shaped by—and resisting—a patriarchal world.
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Vesna Main: Belonging is overrated
06/15/2025
Vesna Main: Belonging is overrated
Vesna Main is a Croatian-born writer who has lived in London for many years and now splits her time between the UK and rural France. Her work spans a range of forms, including the short story collection Temptation, the Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted novel-in-dialogue Good Day?, the autofiction Only A Lodger… And Hardly That, and her most recent novel Waiting for A Party, which features a nonagenarian woman yearning for intimacy in prose that echoes Molly Bloom. We discussed writing in a second language, her interest in autofiction, and the themes of identity and belonging that run through her work. Vesna also spoke about the feeling of never quite arriving, and why she sees writing as a lifelong act of hope.
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Balsam Karam: The known becomes more beautiful when the foreign enters
06/08/2025
Balsam Karam: The known becomes more beautiful when the foreign enters
Balsam Karam is a writer and university lecturer of Kurdish heritage who has lived in Sweden since childhood. She made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed novel Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize and won the Småland Literature Festival’s Migrant Prize. Her second novel, The Singularity—originally published in Sweden in 2021 and released in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2024—was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature, the August Prize, and Svenska Dagbladet’s Literature Prize. We discussed her experiences as an immigrant, how she brings her mother tongues into Swedish, the prejudices and obstacles she has had to overcome, and her sense of home as a place where she can cry in peace.
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Thea Lenarduzzi: Stay Open to All the Languages
06/01/2025
Thea Lenarduzzi: Stay Open to All the Languages
Thea Lenarduzzi is a writer, broadcaster and editor. Her debut, Dandelions, a family memoir and cultural history of migration between Italy and England, won the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and was shortlisted for the Ackerley Prize for ‘literary autobiography of outstanding merit’. The Tower, a story about storytelling, blends history, fiction, memoir, fairy tale and folklore to explore power and its abuses (forthcoming, October 2025; preorder: ). She is working on a biography of Natalia Ginzburg, Collapsing Houses: Pieces of Natalia Ginzburg. We discussed Thea's experience of living and writing between two cultures and what it means to of it, a British-Italian identity. Thea reflected on the legacy of her family history in Dandelions, the feeling of being at home in two places and the influence of her European schooling. She also spoke about her deep admiration for Ginzburg, the challenges of bilingual writing and the richness of embracing multiple languages in her creative life.
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Ani Gjika: The Language of Freedom
05/25/2025
Ani Gjika: The Language of Freedom
Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born writer who moved to the U.S. when she was eighteen. She is the award-winning author and literary translator of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, among them (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize. Most recently, she is the recipient of the New Immigrant Writing Prize for her memoir, , (Restless Books, 2023), which was a 2023 Foreword INDIES winner and on the 2024 Massachusetts Book Award longlist for nonfiction. Gjika is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the NEA, English PEN, Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, and others. For more, visit her website at: We discussed Ani's journey as a bilingual writer, her shift from Albanian to English and the complex layers of identity that come with writing across languages. Ani spoke about womanhood in her work, the struggle with verbal expression and the freedom she finds in writing. She also shared the importance of a mother tongue, the challenges of translation, and advice for fellow translingual authors.
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Julie Irigaray: The Hidden Dangers of Feedback
05/18/2025
Julie Irigaray: The Hidden Dangers of Feedback
Julie Irigaray is a French-Basque poet based in Birmingham. Her pamphlet "Wailer, Witches and Gouches" was featured on BBC Radio 4, and her work has appeared in over 60 publications, including The Realtor, Ambit and Magma. A finalist or winner in 19 poetry competitions, most recently the 2024 Bridport Prize, she also teaches creative writing at City Lit. We discussed language, identity and belonging, the loss of Julie's cultural roots, the creative freedom of writing in English and the shifting experience of being both outsider and insider in the UK. Julie also opened up about her writing process navigating feedback and an upcoming memoir on language and love for England.
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Elizabeth Torres: Every Language is a Codex
05/11/2025
Elizabeth Torres: Every Language is a Codex
Elizabeth Torres, known as Madam Neverstop, is a Colombian-American poet, translator, and multimedia artist residing in Denmark. With a background in Media & Film and Fine Arts from Kean University, NJ, and an MFA in Performing Arts from Den Danske Scenekunstskole, her work spans poetic journalism, artistic installations, film, soundscapes, and visual arts. She explores themes of displacement, identity, and minority representation through various media and has authored over 20 poetry books in multiple languages, contributing to numerous anthologies worldwide. In 2022 Elizabeth was the recipient of the Ambroggio Prize by the Academy of American Poets for her book Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes. As a cultural organizer, she is the founder and director of The Poetic Phonotheque, Red Door Magazine & Gallery, the Nature & Culture: International Poetry Film Fest, Resonans Fringe Festival, and is the host of the Red Transmissions Podcast. We talked about Elizabeth's journey from Colombia to the to the US; how war, migration and language shaped their voice. She also talks about the healing force of poetry, the complexity of translation, and her life now in Denmark as a bilingual artist working across borders and forms. www.madamneverstop.com
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Sulaiman Addonia: Writing is Not Just About Language (Bonus Episode)
11/29/2024
Sulaiman Addonia: Writing is Not Just About Language (Bonus Episode)
Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. As a child, he lived in refugee camps in Sudan and Saudi Arabia. His third novel, The Seers, has been published in 2024. His first novel, The Consequences of Love, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2021 he published Silence Is My Mother Tongue. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Addonia now lives in London, where he runs a creative writing school for refugees and asylum seekers. In Brussels, he founded The Asmara Addis Literary (in Exile) Festival (AALFIE), a vagabond, multilingual celebration rooted in pan-African and feminist values. It aims to showcase the rich linguistic wealth and diversity of European artists with international backgrounds.
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Ruben Quesada: Bridging Cultures through Translation
10/27/2024
Ruben Quesada: Bridging Cultures through Translation
Ruben Quesada is a Costa Rican-American poet and translator based in Chicago. His latest poetry collection, Brutal Companion, winner of the Barrow Street Press Editors Prize, was published in October 2024. He edited the anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, which won an Independent Publisher Book Award in 2023. Quesada’s work appears in Seneca Review, American Poetry Review, the Best American Poetry series, Harvard Review, and The New York Times Magazine. We discussed the influence of Ruben's Costa Rican background on his poetry and the importance of storytelling and translation in bridging cultural gaps, as well as his desire to preserve his family's culture through his work.
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Noémi Kiss-Déaki: English is My Allspice
10/20/2024
Noémi Kiss-Déaki: English is My Allspice
Noémi Kiss-Deáki is a Hungarian author living in Finland. Her début novel, Mary and The Rabbit Dream, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2024. Noémi currently lives on the Åland Islands with her daughter. We discussed her creative process, the challenges and joys of navigating languages and cultures, and how Noémi found her writing voice in English.
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Viviana Fiorentino: We are Collectors of Others
10/13/2024
Viviana Fiorentino: We are Collectors of Others
Viviana Fiorentino is an Italian poet, novelist, and translator living in Ireland. Her poems in English appeared in anthologies (Dedalus Press, Salmon Poetry, and Arlen House), magazines (Banshee, The Stinging Fly, Southword, The London Magazine) , on public transports in Dublin (Poetry in Motion, Poetry Ireland), on air for RTÉ 1, in the The Irish Poetry Reading Archive. She translated into Italian the Irish poets Freda Laughton (Arcipelago Itaca, 2022), Doireann Ní Ghríofa (VersoDove, rivista di Letteratura, n. 23, 2024), Paula Meehan (Il Pietrisco, 2023) and Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier (Verodove, rivista di Letteratura, n. 22, 2023). She published an essay on Anne Carson with translations in the volume Trasparenze 8/22 of San Marco dei Giustiniani (2022). In Italian, she published a novel (, 2019) and two poetry collections ( Press 2019, 2021). Viviana’s short stories, poems, interviews and essays have been published in Literary Journals and online magazines such as Italian Poetry Review, Nazione Indiana, Nuovi Argomenti, Balena Bianca. She is the 2022 Irish Chair Of Poetry Student Prize winner and finalist in the Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Competition 2024. Viviana is currently a PhD candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre (Queen's University Belfast.) We discussed Viviana's journey as a poet and writer who transitioned from Italian to English after moving to Ireland, the role of translation in her creative process, and the emotional shield English has given her.
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Yael van der Wouden: English Gave Me Control over My Experiences
10/05/2024
Yael van der Wouden: English Gave Me Control over My Experiences
Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher of creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her debut novel, The Safekeep, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024 and has been translated into over fourteen languages. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, "On (Not) Reading Anne Frank", has received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018. We discussed the role of displacement and otherness in Yael's work and how English gave her a sense of control over her experiences. Yael also reflected on the challenges of writing in multiple languages and the differences in tolerance towards foreignness in English and in Dutch.
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Pegah Ouji: Glimpsing the Chosen Tongue through a Keyhole
09/28/2024
Pegah Ouji: Glimpsing the Chosen Tongue through a Keyhole
Pegah Ouji is an Iranian American writer who writes in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Joyland, Epiphany, Fugue, Split Lip among others. She has been a scholarship recipient from Kundiman, Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, Literary Arts, Grub Street, and Shipman Agency. She was a 2024 Emerging Writer Fellow at Smokelong Quarterly. She is currently an editorial fellow at Roots, Wounds, Words where she is working on an anthology of creative work by BIPOC justice-involved and impacted artists. We discussed the challenges Pegah encountered as an outsider in America, as well as the complexities of language and Pegah's desire to create a space that blends both Farsi and English. You can read Pegah's story, Is It Too Late? .
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Sumitra Singam: Learning and Translating Trauma as a Language
09/21/2024
Sumitra Singam: Learning and Translating Trauma as a Language
Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian writer and psychiatrist living in Melbourne. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected on Best Microfictions 2024. She works in mental health. We discussed how Sumitra incorporates words from different languages into her stories and the impact of her Malay literary tradition on her writing style. Sumitra also explores the connection between trauma and language, highlighting the power of putting traumatic experiences into words and emphasizing the importance of language in shaping our understanding of ourselves and our experiences.
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Aleksandar Hemon: When a Mother Tongue Stops Being Enough
09/14/2024
Aleksandar Hemon: When a Mother Tongue Stops Being Enough
Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, as well as The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, Love and Obstacles, The Book of My Lives, The Making of Zombie Wars, as well as a couple of non-fiction books. His most recent novel is The World and All That It Holds (2023) Aleksandar Hemon has worked as a writer for Radio Sarajevo Youth Program, and then as a waiter, canvasser, bookseller, bike messenger, as well as a supervisor at a literacy center, and a teacher of English as a second language (all in Chicago). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times, Playboy, McSweeney’s, TriQuarterly, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, Ploughshares and The Paris Review, among others. He’s written for film and television, most recently The Matrix Resurrections. He produces and releases music as Cielo Hemon. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the PEN/ W.G. Sebald Award, a USA Fellowship, PEN/Jean Stein Oral History Grant etc. He has taught at Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champagne, Columbia College Chicago, University of Chicago, New York University. He finally settled at Princeton University, where he teaches now. We discussed the changes a second language brings to the author's voice and perspective, as well as Hemon's connection to his native Sarajevo and how he translates the city for a foreign audience. Hemon also shared his experience of writing columns in Bosnian as a diasporic person and how writers should allow themselves to write in as many languages as they wish because languages are superpowers.
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Miriam Calleja: The Imposter Syndrome and the Dangers of Translating Velvet into Plastic
09/08/2024
Miriam Calleja: The Imposter Syndrome and the Dangers of Translating Velvet into Plastic
Miriam Calleja is an award-winning Maltese bilingual freelance poet, nonfiction/fiction writer, workshop leader, and translator. She is the author of three poetry collections, two chapbooks, and several collaborative works. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and in translation worldwide. She has recently been Highly Commended for a translated poem by the Stephen Spender Trust. Her latest chapbook is titled Come Closer, I Don’t Mind the Silence (BottleCap Press, 2023). Her essays and poems have appeared in Platform Review, Odyssey, Taos Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Modern Poetry in Translation, humana obscura, and elsewhere. Miriam lives in Birmingham, Alabama. We discussed the challenges of adjusting to a new culture and language and how that has directed Miriam's poetry. Miriam also explored the difference between her English and her Maltese writing voices and how complex it is to translate the essence of a poem in another language.
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Grace Loh Prasad: I Don't Have Instructions for the Language I've Lost
09/01/2024
Grace Loh Prasad: I Don't Have Instructions for the Language I've Lost
Grace Loh Prasad is the author of The Translator's Daughter (Mad Creeks Books/Ohio University Press 2024), a debut memoir about living between languages, navigating gloss and the search for belonging. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Literary hub, Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Oldster Magazine, and elsewhere. A member of the Writers Grotto and the AAPI Writers' Collective Seventeen Syllables, Prasad lives in the Bay Area. We discussed Grace's experience of living Taiwan as a young child and losing a mother tongue. She also reflected on the challenges of navigating between languages and cultures and the search for belonging. Finally, Grace shared her journey of rediscovering her Taiwanese heritage and the impact it had on our identity.
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Leila Aboulela: My Story Can only Be Told in English
08/25/2024
Leila Aboulela: My Story Can only Be Told in English
Leila Aboulela is the first-ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Nominated three times for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), she is the author of numerous novels, including Bird Summons, The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, which was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Her collection of short stories Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year. Leila’s work has been translated into fifteen languages, and her plays The Insider, The Mystic Life and others were broadcast on BBC Radio. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland.
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Lucy Tan: Give Yourself Permission to Tell Your Stories
08/18/2024
Lucy Tan: Give Yourself Permission to Tell Your Stories
Lucy Tan is the author of the novel What We Were Promised, which was a Barnes & Nobles Discover Pick, a Washington Post Best Book of 2018, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Originally from New Jersey, Lucy lives and writes in Seattle. You can read about Lucy's experience of rediscovering Chinese while at college .
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Hisham Matar: Literature as a Translation of Humanity
08/11/2024
Hisham Matar: Literature as a Translation of Humanity
Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents. He spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. He is the author of the novels In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance. His two memoirs are: The Return, which was the recipient of a 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, France’s Prix du Livre Etranger Inter & Le Journal du Dimanche and Germany's Geschwister Scholl Prize, and A Month in Siena, a meditation on grief, art and human intimacy. His most recent book, published in January 2024, is the novel My Friends, which has recently won an Orwell Prize and been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Matar is a Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.
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Jesse Lee Kercheval: Spanish brought poetry alive for me again
03/24/2024
Jesse Lee Kercheval: Spanish brought poetry alive for me again
Jesse Lee Kercheval is an award-winning artist, writer, poet, and translator. Her most recent books include the poetry collections, I want to tell you, and Un Pez Dorado no te sirve para nada. Selected poems translated by Ezequiel Zaindenwerg and published in Uruguay by editorial Yaugarù, which also published Jesse's collection of Spanish language poetry, Extranjera/Stranger. Jesse's other books include America that island off the Coast of France, The Alice Stories, and the memoir Space, all of which won important awards. Jess's translations include poems by Idea Vilariño and Circe Maia. Jess is the Zona Gale Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the editor of the Wisconsin Poetry Series at the University of Wisconsin Press. Jesse's graphic memoir, French Girl, is forthcoming from Philmau's Press. She currently lives between Madison, Wisconsin and Montevideo, Uruguay. Together, we discuss Jesse's experience of becoming a translingual writer in Spanish, how she discovered her love for Spanish while living in Uruguay, and how it led her to become a translator of Uruguayan poetry. Jesse also talked about the challenges and joys of writing poetry in Spanish, the impact of switching language on a writer's voice, and the reception of her work in a second language.
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Jenny Liao: Losing a Mother Tongue
03/17/2024
Jenny Liao: Losing a Mother Tongue
Jenny Liao is a Chinese -American writer born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of two children's books, Everyone Loves Lunchtime but Zia and Everyone Loves Career Day but Zia. Jenny's writing has been featured in The New Yorker and Bon Appetit. Jenny currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two Calico cats, Donald and Bigné, and you can find her on Instagram and Twitter, @jaleao, or on her website, . We discussed how Jenny's been working to regain fluency in her mother tongue, Cantonese, through classes and practicing with a mother, how challenging it is to translate certain concepts from one tongue to the other, and how you can lose a mother tongue but never completely grieve its loss.
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Avra Margariti: The Freedom of a Non-Gendered Language
03/10/2024
Avra Margariti: The Freedom of a Non-Gendered Language
Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster and Rhysling-nominated poet with the fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra's work haunts publications such as Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, F &SF, Podcastle, Asimov's, Vastarien and Reckoning. You can find Avra on Twitter @AvraMargariti. Together we discussed Avra's early publishing experience and the inspiration she found in Greek authors writing in English. Avra also expressed her concern about the retelling of Greek mythology in Anglo -Saxon literature and the commodification of Greek myths for branding purposes. Finally, Avra highlighted the importance of preserving the Greek vibe and folklore in writing, and she offered advice for writers starting to write in a second language.
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Alina Stefanescu: The Child in Me is Always Romanian
03/03/2024
Alina Stefanescu: The Child in Me is Always Romanian
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Alina is the author of several publications, including a creative nonfiction chapbook, (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and , which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, , won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at We discussed how Alina started writing creatively to bridge the gap between her Romanian and American identities, the self-censorship she feels as an immigrant writer and how her voice changes when switching between Romanian and English.
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Ana Maria Caballero: Languages as different bone structures
02/25/2024
Ana Maria Caballero: Languages as different bone structures
Ana Maria Caballero is a Colombian-American literary artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She's the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Arts Writer Award, a Sevens Foundation Grant and has been a finalist for numerous other literary and arts prizes. We discussed how her themes and writing style have evolved with each language, the growing presence of digital and crypto poetry, and her use of AI in poetry and art, highlighting the different interpretations of prose and poetry, in Spanish and English. Caballero is the author of Mammal (forthcoming via Steel Tool Books, 2024); Cortadas (forthcoming from S/W Ediciones, 2025); A Petit Mal (Black Spring Press, 2023); Tryst (Alexandria Publishing, 2022); mid-life (Finishing Line Press, 2016); Reverse Commute (Silver Birch Press, 2014); Entre domingo y domingo (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2023 and 2014). She lives in Madrid with her husband and children.
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Alison Mooney - Choosing Tongues to Understand People
02/18/2024
Alison Mooney - Choosing Tongues to Understand People
Alison Mooney is a poet, storyteller and dancer who has lived in France, the US, Ireland, Germany, and now lives in Brussels. For many years she worked across Europe in the private sector, before joining the European Parliament 10 years ago. In 2020, Alison won the Cicero Speechwriting Award, from the US Professional Speechwriters Association, for a poetic motivational speech. In 2022, she was appointed speechwriter to the President of the European Parliament. In 2023, Alison self-published a collection of multilingual poetry: Balance – in mind, in body, in soul. The first edition was sold out within weeks and Alison has been giving poetry readings in Brussels, Dublin, Connemara, and France. Her multilingual poetry collection is a journey on a tight-rope in search of balance: in mind, in body, in soul. Accompanyied by photography from award-winning photographer Sean Hayes, Alison Mooney’s book is graphically built like an art triptych. On one side, poems of grief, on the other poems of healing and suspended in the centre a speech on finding balance. You can listen to Alison's prize-winning motivational speech , you can listen to Alison reading her poem Beyond You, from her collection.
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Mordecai Martin: Reclaim your chosen tongues!
02/11/2024
Mordecai Martin: Reclaim your chosen tongues!
Mordecai Martin is an Ashkenazi Jewish writer, a Bisexual Psychiatric Survivor, an aspiring translator of Yiddish and Spanish, and a fifth generation New Yorker. He lives in Washington Heights, Manhattan with his wife, son, and cat. He is an MFA candidate at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. In his non-fiction he writes to explore family, history, place, and mental illness. In his fiction, he strives to chronicle and capture the peculiarities of voice, the miraculous nature of event, and the depths and edges of Jewish humanity. Using his translation skills, he hopes to create hybridized texts that make personal essays out of translator notes and prefaces, to confound the traditional separation between translator, translated, reader, writer, narrator and self. His creative non-fiction has appeared in Honey Literary, Catapult Magazine, Longleaf Review, Peach Magazine, Autofocus Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine and The Hypocrite Reader. His fiction has been featured in Identity Theory, Timber Journal, X-Ray Lit, Gone Lawn, Knight’s Library Magazine, Funicular, and Sortes.
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