MFA alum Rebecca Suzuki’s award-winning chapbook, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful, is listed as number four on Small Press Distribution’s Poetry Bestsellers!
When My Mother Is Most Beautiful is the most recent winner of the Loose Translations Award from Hanging Loose Press, which publishes a work of translation from a Queens College MFA student each year. Partnering on this award with this respected independent press celebrates what our program is all about: Language. Culture. Community. We have built not just our translation track, but our entire program on these pillars.
When My Mother Is Most Beautiful is at once a powerful love letter to a mother and to language itself, delving into complex questions of family, communication, culture, and connection. These poems chronicle the difficult art of navigating multiple cultural identities, examining how languages twist and morph across cultures through the imperfect act of translation, how they bind people together and keep them apart, and even how they could be reimagined to make a better world.
Pick up your copy today directly from Hanging Loose!
Professor Jason Tougaw has a new piece on Psychology Today, on Dory Previn, hearing voices, and the new documentary about her–Dory Previn: On My Way to Where.
There are two stunning poems in The New Yorker and O Bod by the Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah, which have been co-translated by QC MFA professor Ammiel Alcalay. Go check them out! (Links below:)
Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963 and lives there. Like all Palestinians presently in Gaza, he and his family have been forcibly displaced. He got his BA in Agricultural Science in 1985, before going on to work as Director of the Communication Department in the Agriculture Ministry. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union and has published five collections of poetry, Running After Dead Gazelles (2003); One of Nobody (2010); Passersby with Light Clothes (2013); Water Thirsty for Water (2016); Eulogy for the Robin (2020), and a novel, Since approximately an hour (2018). Some of his poems have been translated into English, French, and Hebrew. The translators, Ammiel Alcalay, Khaled al-Hilli, and Emna Zghal, are working on a collection of Nasser Rabah’s poems for City Lights, due out in Spring 2025.
Emna Zghal is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. She was trained in both Tunisia and the United States and has shown her work in both countries and beyond. Reviews of her exhibits have appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Artforum, among other publications. Noted public collections include the Newark Museum, Flint Institute of Art, Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, The Africa Center, NY, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY. emnazghal.com
Poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay’s over 20 books include After Jews and Arabs (University of Minnesota Press, 1992), Memories of Our Future (City Lights, 2001), and the forthcoming CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books (Litmus Press).
Khaled al-Hilli teaches Arabic at New York University and is completing a doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center on the post-2003 Iraqi novel. His Sargon Boulos: “This Great River” Translating the Beats into Arabic, is due out from Lost & Found in 2024.
Rajiv will be reading poems and singing ancestral songs as part of “Acoustic Fulcrums,” a diasporic night representative of Caribbean memory, language, and iconic sound culture.
DATE: SAT, MAY 11, 2024, 7 PM VENUE: LeFrak Concert Hall TICKETS: $10/FREE with Online RSVP for QC Students, Faculty & Staff w/ ID
Join us for an exclusive live episode of the SongWriter podcast where stories turn into songs! We welcome two iconic artists to the stage: the legendary author Joyce Carol Oates and the innovative musician and novelist Ali Sethi, recognized in TIME’s 100 Next list. Hosted by the podcast’s creator and producer, Ben Arthur, this live event promises captivating stories, mesmerizing music, and thought-provoking conversations.
There is no more versatile and accomplished American writer than Joyce Carol Oates. The author of many books, Oates has penned bestselling novels, critically acclaimed collections of short fiction, as well as essays, plays, poetry, a memoir, A Widow’s Story, and an unlikely bestseller, On Boxing. Her remarkable literary industry – which includes work as an editor and anthologist – spans forms, themes, topics and genres. Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and since 1978, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ali Sethi, a New York-based writer, composer, and performer, gained global fame with his hit single “Pasoori,” topping Spotify’s Global Viral chart in 2022 and becoming Google’s most hummed-to-search song. Blending traditional South Asian melodies with global beats and drawing on “folk” and “woke” iconographies to tell powerful tales of identity, Sethi’s work has been described as “stealthily subversive” by The New Yorker. His innovative approach has earned him a spot on TIME’s 100 Next list.”
Ben Arthur, an Emmy-nominated songwriter, hosts and produces SongWriter, a podcast transforming stories into songs. His upcoming album, “Remission,” completes a musical trilogy alongside “Collision” and “Transmission,” with many tracks inspired by episodes of SongWriter. Notable guests this season include Neil Gaiman, Kat Edmonson, and George Saunders. Past guests have included Questlove, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Gilmour. SongWriter episodes are previewed by Paste Magazine and featured on Acoustic Cafe for 1.5M listeners. “Remission” showcases performances from Byron Isaacs and Tony Trischka. Ben has released eleven albums, authored two novels, and shared the stage with artists like Dave Matthews and Tori Amos. He’s also licensed songs to major networks and co-produced the Emmy-nominated series SongCraft Presents since 2011.
This event is presented by the Queens College School of Arts, the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation, and Kupferberg Center for the Arts.
Wednesday, March 27, 2024 10:30 AM to 6:00 PM Presidental Conference Room 2 (5th Fl.) Rosenthal Library, Queens College LINK/INFO
The Queens College Graduate Conference in English Literature Studies is happening on March 27th, and our MFA students are showcasing the unique knowledge they’ve developed through their practice of creative writing & literary translation with scholarship.
Current MFA students Julie Goodale and Richard Prins will be taking place in this year’s conference as well! Julie will be making a presentation on docupoetics and performance called “Taking Up Space: Extending the Document into Multiple Dimensions,” and Richard will be talking about his translations of several speculative Swahili novels, and offering some thoughts on the particular appeal of utopia to Swahili literature in a talk called “Kusadikika and Walenisi: The Purpose of Utopia in the Swahili Novel.”
This is just some of the amazing work you can expect from an MFA Program as unique as Queens College! We engage multiple cultures and perspectives reflective of being located in the most culturally diverse place on the planet, and in doing so we prepare students not just to generate their own creative work but also academically to pursue further graduate studies (such as PhDs) or work in other fields.
To see exactly when these presentations are happening, check out the full conference schedule:
Brooklyn Raga Massive’s Ragini Festival 2024 presents “Acoustic Fulcrums” – a diasporic night representative of Caribbean memory, language and iconic sound culture. Centered around the work of poet, memoirist and translator, Rajiv Mohabir and the arrangements of steel pan artist and bandleader, Josanne Francis, this curated night explores the axis of acoustic memory and palpable story telling, capturing the many rifts, continents and currents expressive of the Caribbean postcolonial experience.
Rajiv Mohabir’s work traverses and emanates out of a long dialogue with collective memory around the migrant experience, around fractured yet continuously sung oral history and the poetics, sonic transference and healing that writing can offer.
Josanne Francis is a maestra of the steelpan instrument, an innovation born out of colonial resistance, repurposing petroleum industry metal containers within the urban tenements of Trinidad’s capital area. Now steelpan has become a large orchestral, ensemble and improvisatory instrument, blooming with the sounds of African-descended percussive innovation.
We are so excited about our visit from N.K. Jemisin coming up on March 27. It’s not too often you have a three-time winner of the Hugo Award right in front of you, and even more impressive is that she’s the first author to win the award three consecutive years in a row (for her Broken Earth trilogy).
And the good news is you have two ways to attend, by RSVP for in-person, and over Zoom, so you don’t have to miss out on this fantastic reading!
Please join us for a reading by the legendary Vivian Gornick. Memoirist, critic, and CUNY graduate, Gornick is a pioneer of creative nonfiction, writing with unwavering willingness to share from her experiences to explore larger social issues.
Gornick will read from her extensive body of work, then join in a question and answer session moderated by MFA alum Catherine LaSota. This is surely an event not to be missed, so if you can’t make it to our beautiful Queens College campus, be sure to login over Zoom so you don’t miss a thing!
For Vivian Gornick, self-narrative is a form of cultural criticism: The personal is decidedly political. Born in the Bronx, she grew up in a family of working-class immigrants with parents who were committed Communists. Since the 1960s, she has been a writer of journalism, essays, and memoirs. Much of her writing explores the actual and metaphoric significance of being an outsider—perpetually “half in, half out.” Despite her claim that feminism ended her attachment to Judaism, the experience of being “twice an outsider” (Jewish and female) serves for her as a powerful lesson in marginality. In works on feminist radicals Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Emma Goldman, she has expanded the autobiographical form to include the biographical, offering an ideological and genealogical starting point for Gornick’s own involvement in second wave feminism. She is currently at work on a book about CUNY’s City College of New York.
Catherine LaSota (MFA in Creative Nonfiction ‘24, Queens College) is the Associate Director of Social Practice CUNY. She is the founder of the Resort writing community and host of the Cabana Chats podcast on writing and community. From 2015–2020, Catherine hosted the acclaimed LIC Reading Series, and she is the former executive director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. Her writing appears in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Vice, The Brooklyn Rail, Catapult, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and two young children in Queens.
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