Eugene Ostashevsky

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator. This reading celebrates the release of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, his novel in poems about communication challenges affecting pirate-parrot relationships, from NYRB Poets. He is also the author of The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by UDP. Born in Russia, brought up in the US, and currently residing in Berlin while working in Paris, he writes about how languages do not match each other or themselves. He often puns.

Uljana Wolf

Uljana Wolf is a poet and translator based in Brooklyn and Berlin. She published four books of poetry in German and translated numorous writers from English snd Polish into German, among them Yoko Ono, John Ashbery, Erin Moure, Cole Swensen, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Christian Hawkey, and Eugene Ostashevsky. Her most recent German publication is “Wandernde Errands,” an essay on the translingual poetics of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Wunderhorn 2016). English translations of her work appeared in several chapbooks, among them “i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where”, translated by Sophie Seita (Wonder Press, Brooklyn 2015). Forthcoming is “Subsisters. Selected poems,” edited and translated by Sophie Seita (Belladonna*, summer 2017). Uljana Wolf teaches German language and literary translation at New York University, the Pratt Institute, Humboldt University Berlin and the Institute für Sprachkunst, Vienna.

Sophie Seita

Sophie Seita is a poet, playwright, translator, and scholar. Her most recent chapbook is Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015). She’s the editor of a facsimile reprint of The Blind Man (UDP, 2017) and the translator of Uljana Wolf’s i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where (Wonder, 2015) and Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna, 2017), for which she received a 2015 PEN/Heim Award. Other writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Bomb, Emergency Index, The White Review, Gauss PDF, Currently & Emotion, and PEN America. Her play Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers, will be performed at La MaMa Galleria in March 2017. She is a Junior Research Fellow in English at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, working on her first monograph, tentatively called, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital.