Hiromi Itō, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important and highly regarded poets in Japan. Since her sensational debut in the late 1970s as a free-spirited and intelligent female poet with shamanisitic qualities, Ito has published more than 10 collections of poetry including Oume (Green Plums, 1982), Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I am Anjyuhimeko, 1993), and Kawara Arekusa (Wild Grass upon a Riverbank, 2005) which won the prestigious Takami Jun Award. She has also written a dozen essay collections on such diverse topics as child-rearing, foliage plants and English lessons, collaborated with the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki and the feminist critic Chizuko Ueno, translated the medieval Buddhist stories and a 19th-century novel into modern Japanese, and published novellas, two of which were the finalists for the Akutagawa Prize, the Japan’s most prominent award for literary fiction. Montrealer Erín Moure has published 17 books of poetry in English and Galician/English, and 12 volumes of poetry translated into English from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese, by poets such as Nicole Brossard (with Robert Majzels), Andrés Ajens, Louise Dupré, Rosalía de Castro, Chus Pato and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General’s Award, Pat Lowther Memorial Award, A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. Moure is currently finishing the impossible play Kapusta, sequel to The Unmemntioable, and is translating Brazilian poet Wilson Bueno’s Mar Paraguayo. She is the 2013-2014 Writer in Residence at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. In April 2014, BookThug will publish Moure’s Insecession, a biotranslatory poetics echoing the acclaimed Galician poet Chus Pato, alongside her translation of Pato’s biopoetics, Secession.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.