Friends, family, and literary admirers of all kinds packed the beautiful independent bookshop, to hear Suzuki read from her work. It was truly heartwarming to see all the support from the MFA community and beyond!
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.
You can pick up this book at the book party, of course, or order a copy today from Small Press Distribution!
We have to bring some special attention to Words Without Borders, and not just because MFA alum Eric Becker has been the Senior Editor there for several years now, but because WWB is one of the few magazines in the world dedicated to literature in translation. One of the things that makes our program so unique is our dedicated translation track, which means we share in the very same global literary conversation that Words Without Borders publishes in their pages.
This anniversary is the perfect time for this write-up in The New York Times, “Celebrating Literature That ‘Brings the World Close’,” which highlights the importance of what WWB does, especially in the midst of all the strife occurring around the world as we speak.
“At the end of the day, readers want to read a great book,” said Karen Phillips, the executive director of Words Without Borders, “and there are so many great books in translation.”Credit…Beowulf Sheehan
Being situated in the most diverse place on the planet naturally connects us to the world at large around us, through all the cultures that surround our humble program. That’s why we’re so grateful to WWB for creating unparalleled access to the world’s literary voices, because we all need to hear each other.
Congratulations on 20 years, and here’s to 20 more!
Congratulations to MFA alum Jasper Lo, who’s just published his first reported piece in The New Yorker, about City Council members running for office in Brooklyn’s recently redrawn, majority-Asian district.
Queens College Special Collections and Archives recently acquired a curated box of over 60 zines from BlackMass Publishing that explore politics, jazz, religion, architecture, and other themes. We were able to celebrate this acquisition with an open archives visit and a a conversation with BlackMass publishers Yusuf Hassan and Kwamé Sorrell
BlackMass Publishing is an independent press promoting and publishing material by Black artists founded by Yusuf Hassan in 2019. Combining archival photographs and found print material with poetry and jazz music, BlackMass grapples with the blurred lines and idiosyncrasies which make up the collective improvisation of African diasporic culture.
Sponsored by Queens College Library Special Collections and Archives, the Queens College MFA Program, and Queens College Africana Studies, with the generous support of the Pine Tree Foundation of New York.
We were so happy to announce when MFA alum Rebecca Suzuki was the most recent winner of the Loose Translations Award from Hanging Loose Press, which publishes one work of translation each year. We’re doubly excited to tell you about the buzz surrounding the upcoming publication of this hybrid volume of poetry, especially since another MFA alum, Jay Boss Rubin (an emerging but respected translator in their own right) has written a glowing, in-depth review of When My Mother Is Most Beautiful for Asymptote!
Jay delivers insights into this work as only a fellow translator could, highlighting issues of translation and culture that will speak to our multicultural nation. To use a brief quote:
“Across the delightful hybridity, the author achieves thematic cohesion through her enthusiastic embrace of multilingualism. From the first entry to the last, Suzuki demonstrates multilingualism’s ability to make more resonant questions of identity that, trapped within a single tongue, remain stifling.”
A special congratulations to MFA alum Hannah Lee, for winning the 2023 Birdhouse Prize from Ghostbird Press!
An independent chapbook press founded by MFA alum Peter Vanderberg, Ghostbird Press gives back to the QC community by partnering with the MFA Program to publish one chapbook submitted by a graduating MFA student, starting their post-MFA life with a publication under their belt.
Hannah’s book will come out in the spring, so stay tuned for more details on that!
The Brooklyn Book Festival is New York City’s largest free literary festival and connects readers with local, national, and international authors and publishers during the course of a celebratory literary week. So you had to know that folks from the QC MFA Program would be all over this diverse event, set on nurturing literary community!
Author and translator Rebecca Suzuki with some QC MFA friends who came to buy copies of her book, When My Mother is Most Beautiful.
So many people came out to snag copies of MFA Alum Rebecca Suzuki’s award-winning book, When My Mother is Most Beautiful, which is coming out with Hanging Loose Press in the winter. The Loose Translations Award is a collaboration between our program and Hanging Loose, one of Brooklyn’s oldest independent publishers, with the purpose of bringing more translation from across the globe into literary publishing.
MFA alum Catherine LaSota.
Catherine LaSota participated in two events for the festival. Catherine took her new online writing community, The Resort, to her old stomping grounds at LIC Bar (the home of her previous project, the LIC Reading Series) for a discussion on what role community plays in our writing lives, called “What’s Community Got to Do with It?” She also moderated a panel on the Festival Day itself called “Echoes of Artistry,” about authors whose books embrace creativity as a character, with Brendan Slocumb, Catherine Lacey, Idra Novey, and John Wray.
MFA alum Eric Becker in his natural element: traveling.
MFA alum Eric Becker was also on the scene for Festival Day, moderating a panel called “History Redux and Myths Retold,” where writers challenge readers to reconsider what we think we know, whether it’s disrupting long-held belief systems or accepted historical narratives. Eric is the long-standing Senior Editor at the international literary journal Words Without Borders, as well as a prolific translator from Portuguese, has been a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize, in case you were wondering how he is able to work with esteemed international authors like Carmen Boullosa (The Book of Eve), Leila Aboulela (River Spirit), and Itamar Vieira Jr. (Crooked Plow) with such ease!
Copies of Choir, an experimental work written and performed by Eugene Lim and others, co-published by Wendy’s Subway and Amant.
This year’s Visiting Professor, Eugene Lim, had an early Festival Bookend event “Choir, Live,” where he was joined by Anelise Chen, Danny Tunick, Donald Breckenridge, and Lisa Chen in an in-gallery performative reading of his chapbook, Choir, a text that brings together ten ranting, delusional, and hallucinatory voices that arise from the exhibition’s underbelly. The chapbook is a newly commissioned text that marks the launch of Long Take, a new tri-annual series of creative writing co-published by Wendy’s Subway and Amant, taking its initial prompts from Amant’s exhibition and public events program.
The legendary John Weir mid-performance.
And, not to be outdone, our long-time professor John Weir had a reading as well! John is the winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, which is co-sponsored by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), and his winning short story collection from Red Hen Press, Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, maps the life of a gay man who has “lived through fifty years of the twin crises of global AIDS and toxic masculinity in America.” You can read more about it here on PEN America’s weekly interview series, The PEN Ten!
Left: MFA alum Rajiv Mohabir’s memoir, Antiman. Right: Rebecca Suzuki’s upcoming release, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful, for sale on the Hanging Loose bookfair table right near Professor Kimiko Hahn’s Air Pocket.
When people ask what is an MFA good for, this is exactly what I tell them: the things you learn here are the entrance to a larger literary community, and the more you keep pushing yourself to learn, the more likely you get a chance to see yourself in the same festivals as some of your heroes, or see your books on the same shelves as your professors!
This just in: the Los Angeles Review of Bookspublished a little throwback feature on our own Briallen Hopper’s first book Hard to Love, and it (of course) has a little shoutout to this fine program!
Last week, Esquire published a long essay about a new emergence of literary friendships in writing. I know here at QC, we’ve always prided ourselves on collaboration and community (because we feel that creating support for your writing is the key to success) which is why we’re so glad to see this becoming more of a trend in the literary world.
And, MFA alum Catherina LaSota appears in this essay too, talking about both her writing practice and her former project of the LIC Reading Series, so this is doubly exciting!
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