2020

2020 Fall Convergence

Experimental Translation

Friday, October 2nd 5:30-9:00 pm & Saturday, October 3rd 9:00 am-7:00 pm (all times are Pacific)

Our 2020 Fall Convergence focuses on Experimental Translation as a set of creative practices which engage the original source work through a series of creative interventions including cross-genre and -media conversation and performance, mutation and manipulation, and community collaboration. We envision the Convergence as a space to investigate the following questions and more:

• What are the ethical, political and material stakes of experimental translation?
• What next textual landscapes are created or re-imagined through the processes of experimental translation?
• How does experimental translation intersect with language justice and dialoguing and composing in a multivocal, multilingual and multimodal world?

Organizers/Conveners

Ching-In Chen and Joe Milutis

Friday, October 2

All times are Pacific

5:30 pm — Pre-event Mixer with Seacrestcheadle

Audience members are invited to chat freely, play virtual video, and visually interact while Seacrestcheadle performs “Empty Autotune,” an algorithmic subversion of Zoom that mixes real-time video and audio input and encourages open-ended engagements in a unique, dynamic and unpredictable gestalt.

6:00-9:00 pm — Performances

Performances by Antena Aire (Jen Hofer & & JD Pluecker), Wo Chan, Mónica de la Torre, Duriel Harris, Douglas Kearney, Danny Snelson, Jane Wong

Performers are invited to present work in the spirit of multi-media translation such as not-benshi/neo-benshi (experimental “narration” of moving image or film) or Experimental Karaoke/Lecture, or pecha kucha (experimental “narration” for 30 seconds to 30 images) or a translational experiment that engages with the transmission space of Zoom.

After-party Set by kiptok

Saturday, October 3

All times are Pacific

9:00-9:15 am — Welcome

• Director’s Welcome from Ted Hiebert

9:15-10:45 am — Feature Performance

Antena Aire (Jen Hofer & JD Pluecker), Illuminated Lecture: A Decade of Being Antena Aire

11:00 am-12:30 pm — Panel: Expanded Translation

• Mónica de la Torre, Discontinuous Repetition: Translation’s Erratic Seriality
• Joe Milutis, Translation of Eros
• Danny Snelson, Vectorizing Comics, Augmenting Poetics
• Amaranth Borsuk, Moderator

1:30-3:00 pm — Panel: Translating Hybrid Forms

• Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Meditations on Meaning Machines
• Diana Khoi Nguyen, Would That: Transmutation, Transformation, and Tracing the Lines of Possibility
• Jennif(f)er “JT” Tamayo, Performing ‘Dora the Explorer’: Critiquing U.S. Empire & Recovering Ancestral Memories through Digital Decolonial Imaginaries & Multi-Media Crossings
• Casandra Lopez, A Few Notes on Grief
• Ching-In Chen, Moderator

3:30-5:00 pm — Panel: Community Experiments

• Kazim Ali, Translating Sohrab Sepehri into Intercultural, Transnational, and Multilingual English
• Margaret Noodin, Gijigijiganeshiinh Gikendaa (What the Chickadee Knows): Translations into English from Ojibwe
• Afaa Michael Weaver, “Fourteen Chairs”/ Building Community Among Contemporary Poets in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and the U.S.
• Kristina Lee Podesva, Moderator

5:30-7:00 pm — Feature Performance

• Duriel Harris

Performer/Presenter Bios

Antena Aire

Antena Aire is a language justice and literary experimentation collaborative founded by Jen Hofer and JD Pluecker, both writers, artists, literary translators, bookmakers and activist interpreters. Antena Aire activates links between social justice work and artistic practice by exploring how critical views on language can help us to reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we inhabit. Antena has exhibited, published, performed, organized, advocated, translated, curated, interpreted, and/or instigated with numerous groups and institutions, including Blaffer Art Museum, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, and Project Row Houses. Antena Aire publishes bilingual chapbooks and pamphlets through our Libros Antena Books imprint, and collaborates with BOMB Magazine and Ugly Duckling Presse on the Señal Series of Latin American literature in translation.
[Photo credit: Patri Hadad]

Kazim Ali

Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including several volumes of poetry, novels, and translations. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light.
[Photo credit: Jesse Sutton-Hough]

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where they teach in and direct the MFA in Creative Writing Program.

They are the author of the poetry collections Travesty Generator (Noemi Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Prize, the 2020 Poetry Society of America Anna Rabinowitz Prize, and finalist for the National Poetry Series. They are also the author of Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017); a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press 2016); and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012). Other publications include the chapbook cutthroat glamours (Phantom Books, 2012); the artist book Grand Dessein (Container Press), a mixed media artifact that meditates on the work and writing of the artist Paul Klee; and Tierra Fisurada, a Spanish poetry chapbook published in Argentina (Editoriales del Duende, 2002).
[Photo credit: Adrienne Mathiowetz]

Amaranth Borsuk

Amaranth Borsuk is a poet, scholar, and book artist working at the intersection of print and digital media. Her latest volume, The Book (MIT Press, 2018), is a concise introduction to the book’s changing technologies that bridges book history, artists’ books, and electronic literature. She has collaborated on installations, art bookmarklets, interactive works, and poems, and is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016). Borsuk is Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, where she also serves as Associate Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics.

Wo Chan

Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. Wo’s poetry and performance brings together the playful, high emotions of childhood, queer identity, dream and memory, while confronting the subjects of family, migration, and (un)documentation. They are the winner of the 2020 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. Their chaplet ORDER THE WORLD, MOM was published by Belladonna* in 2016. Wo’s poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and are anthologized in Vinegar & Char, Go Home!, and Bettering American Poetry . As a member of the Brooklyn based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, and New York Live Arts. They are a regular guest on Sasha Velour’s Nightgowns and have performed in operas, music videos, cabarets, and short films. Wo was born in Macau, China, and currently lives in New York. Find them at @theillustriouspearl
[Photo credit: Mettie Ostrowski]

Ching-In Chen

Ching-In Chen, Assistant Professor, is a hybrid writer, community organizer and performer. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems; recombinant, which won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry; to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters, a finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Performance. Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Callaloo, Can Serrat, Storyknife and Imagining America and are a member of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation communities.
[Photo Credit: Cassie Mira]

Mónica de la Torre

Mónica de la Torre works with and between languages. Her poetry books include Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat Books, 2020) and The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). Translations include Defense of the Idol by the Chilean modernist Omar Cáceres, and Portuguese poet Ana Hatherly’s Leonorana. She is a contributing editor to BOMB. Among other publications, her work has appeared in Artforum, Granta 151: Membranes, the Believer, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Photostats (Siglio Press, 2020). She is co-editor of the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information, 2020) and teaches poetry at Brooklyn College.
[Photo credit: Bruce Pearson]

Duriel Harris

Poet, sound artist, and scholar, Duriel E. Harris is the author of three critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, including No Dictionary of a Living Tongue (2017), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award finalist. Multi-genre works include her one-woman show Thingification, the poetry video Speleology, and the conceptual project Blood Labyrinth. Appearances include performances at the Black Midwest Initiative, Lake Forest College, Naropa, the Chicago Jazz Festival, the Votive Poetics Workshop (New Zealand), the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Festival Internacional de Poesía de La Habana.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Best American Experimental Writing, Letters to the Future, PEN America, and Poets.org, among others. Harris is Professor of English at Illinois State University and Editor of Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora.
[Photo credit: Gina Sandrzyk]

Douglas Kearney

Douglas Kearney has published six collections, including Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and California Book Award silver medalist (Poetry). M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up.” Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” His newest collection, Sho (Wave, 2021) is forthcoming. His operas include Sucktion, Mordake, Crescent City, Sweet Land, and next year’s Comet / Poppea. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and lives in St. Paul with his family.
[Photo credit: Bao Phi]

kiptok

kiptok produces narratives for all media. Their work centers on storytelling in forms such as computer art, djing, music and social media timelines. The focus is on cycles, transitions, translation and style, which are significant to our self-mythologizations. Crossing platforms to write dramas, they attempt to make space for new ways of communicating.

Casandra Lopez

Casandra López is a California Indian (Cahuilla/Tongva/Luiseño) and Chicana writer who has received support from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf, and Tin House. She’s the author of the poetry collection, Brother Bullet and her memoir-in-progress, A Few Notes on Grief was granted a 2019 James W. Ray Venture Project Award. She teaches at Northwest Indian College.

Joe Milutis

Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington-Bothell. Work has appeared in Fence, Triple Canopy, Cabinet, Tagvverk, Gauss PDF, ANMLY as well as a variety of performance and gallery venues. He is the author of Failure, A Writer’s Life (Zer0 Books: 2013); Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (University of Minnesota Press: 2006); and Bright Arrogance, a column on experimental translation in Jacket2. Numerous chapbooks, media-literary hybrid works, videos and sound pieces can also be found at Joe Milutis’ website.

Diana Khoi Nguyen

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018), which was selected by Terrance Hayes. In addition to winning the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Margaret Noodin

Margaret Noodin received an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she also serves as Director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education and a Scholar in the Center for Water Policy. She is the author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature and two bilingual collections of poetry Weweni and Gijigijigikendan: What the Chickadee Knows. Her poems are also anthologized in New Poets of Native Nations, Poetry, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Water Stone Review and Yellow Medicine Review. Her research spans linguistic revitalization, indigenous ontologies, traditional science and prevention of violence in indigenous communities. To see and hear current projects visit www.ojibwe.net where she and other students and speakers of Ojibwe have created space for language to be shared by academics and the native community.
[Photo credit: Troye Fox]

Kristina Lee Podesva

Kristina Lee Podesva is the Editor & Publisher of Bellingham based B R U N A press + archive, founded in 2017. She is an artist, writer, publisher, and edited the art journal Fillip from 2005-2015. Her artwork has appeared in exhibitions in Canada, Mexico, Europe, and the US. In addition, her publication-based art has appeared in books and catalogues. She has presented talks and lectures internationally including at the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (Alexandria), Arco Art Fair (Madrid), Art Metropole (Toronto), Casco (Utrecht), Kadist Art Foundation (San Francisco), MOMA (NY), the Power Plant (Toronto), SFMOMA, the Wattis Institute (San Francisco) the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco). She has taught at the California College of the Arts, Emily Carr University, and the Malmö Art Academy. She is currently an adjunct faculty member in the Art and Art History department at Western Washington University.

Seacrescheadle

Seacrestcheadle is an experimentalist who makes gifs, mp4s, wavs, and other file formats. Presently, they use “empty autotune”, in which autotune and other effects reshape microphone feedback, and “empty telepresence”, in which Zoom’s virtual background algorithms are subjected to adversarial camera feedback. Algorithmic outputs re-enter as inputs, and exponential entropic dynamics ensue. By confusing these algorithms, they aim to confuse themself and thier friends on the internet. Seacrestcheadle has posted their content on various universal resource locators.

Danny Snelson

Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at UCLA. His online editorial work can be found on PennSound, Eclipse, UbuWeb, and the EPC. He is the publisher of Edit Publications and founding editor of the Jacket2 Reissues project. His books include Full Bleed: A Mourning Letter for the Printed Page (Sync, 2019), Apocalypse Reliquary: 1984-2000 (Monoskop/Mediabus, 2018), Radios (Make Now, 2016), EXE TXT (Gauss PDF, 2015), Epic Lyric Poem (Troll Thread, 2014), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectural Association, 2011). With Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Avi Alpert, he performs as one-third of the academic performance group Research Service. He is currently developing a manuscript exploring online collections of art and letters entitled The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats. View Danny Selson’s work.

Jennif(f)er “JT” Tamayo

Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, migrant, formerly undocumented poet, essayist, and performer. JT’s poetry books include [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback, 2011), YOU DA ONE (Noemi 2017) and her latest publication, TO KILL THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT (Green Lantern Press, 2018). JT is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California Berkeley where she studies Black and Indigenous poetry in performance, colonial violence and historical forms. She currently lives and works on Patwin and Ohlone territories.

Afaa M. Weaver

Afaa M. Weaver’s (尉雅風) recent books include Spirit Boxing, City of Eternal Spring (2015 Phillis Wheatley Book Award) and The Government of Nature (2014 Kingsley Tufts Award). A Fulbright alum and Guggenheim fellow, he received the Gold Friendship medal from the Beijing Writers’ Association in 2005, and in 2019 he was awarded the Distinguished Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation of Boston and the 96th Arts & Literature Medal from the Chinese Writers Association in Taiwan. Emeritus Professor at Simmons University. Afaa is currently a member of the MFA faculty at Sarah Lawrence.
[Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths]

Jane Wong

Jane Wong is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016), and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, (forthcoming, Alice James Books, 2021). She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University and a scholar of Asian American poetry and poetics.

Her poems can be found in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, POETRY, AGNI, and others. Her essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, The Common, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and more. You can explore her “The Poetics of Haunting” project here.

She has received the Pushcart Prize and the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award as well as fellowships/residencies from Kundiman, the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, 4Culture, Bread Loaf, and others. Her first solo art show “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly” was exhibited at the Frye Art Museum in 2019.