Articles by Nicolle Elizabeth

AWP Report: Trends in South Asian Diaspora Writing

April 14, 2010

I was at the AWP conference in Denver this past weekend to give a reading and sign some chapbooks. The mood was cheery, the elevation high, the Colorado Rocky mountains (which I had never seen in person before) were glorious and the background chatter pleasant. I thought what would be a better panel…...read more »

Interview with Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s “The Romantic Dogs”

March 12, 2010

This interview with Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño's poetry, is part of our month long look at international poetry and celebration of the release of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry by the editors of Words Without Borders. This interview was a collaboration…...read more »

Madmen and Exiles

December 16, 2009

I was late to the Madmen, Exiles, and Savage Detectives: Latin American Poetry panel at the Philoctetes Center this Tuesday. I was late because I was puttering around the fourth floor poetry section at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square here in New York City. Among the shelves, out of place, was a…...read more »

Triptych Reading Series

November 17, 2009

If you are in New York City, you must, you absolutely must, attend the Triptych Reading Series. Curated by Iranian-born translator and poet Kaveh Bassiri and poet Mary Austin Speaker, the reading series brings everyone from Mark Strand to Charles Wright (this week), and next month will feature John Ashbery.…...read more »

The Launch of Belletrista: Celebrating Women Writers from Around the World

September 18, 2009

A new bi-monthly magazine celebrating women writers has landed. Belletrista, carved of moonlight, aims to share the varying voices of females internationally and I couldn't be happier about it. In solidarity through our gender and our craft, this magazine is exposing readers to a galaxy of known and…...read more »

French Reading Series at Cornelia Street Cafe

June 29, 2009

Cornelia Street Cafe is a restaurant in the West Village of New York City that has historically been a venue for incredible works of literature to be shared. The walls are blue and lined with mirrors and there’s an old upright piano on the stage. I’ve had the opportunity to read fiction twice…...read more »

Kafka Tribute in New York

June 15, 2009

What better way to spend a Sunday night in New York then at a “tribute to Kafka” reading, and what better place to do it than the KGB Bar? The KGB is an institution here in New York, for many years now, and the fiction reading series is curated by the talented Suzanne Dottino. The line-up…...read more »

The Hidden Fact: Gerald Martin talk on his Gabriel Garcia Marquez Bio

June 5, 2009

Gerald Martin's talk on his new work, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life (Knopf) at the Americas Society on Park Avenue this past week was as magical as one would have guessed anything involving Marquez would be. The rooms at the Americas Society remind me of Versailles, and in the audience, I was told,…...read more »

PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL: Faith and Fiction

May 8, 2009

The Faith & Fiction panel at the Powerhouse Arena felt like a transcendental experience altogether. The Arena is made up of giant glass windows for walls, and stands hidden at the foot of the East River and under the Manhattan Bridge surrounded by cobblestone. Outside it was pouring warm rain and…...read more »

PEN World Voices Festival: PEN Cabaret

May 4, 2009

The PEN Cabaret at FIAF (French Institute Alliance Française ) last night was both intense and wonderful. Performers, poets, writers, readers, musicians, film makers, actors, PEN members, and countless others came out for PEN's annual cabaret celebration. Salman Rushdie, while not a reader this…...read more »

Raising The Dead

April 29, 2009

It is not everyday a person has the pleasure of seeing Mark Harman, Richard Howard and Sarah Ruden together in one place. Mark Harman, responsible for Kafka's Amerika and many other Kafka translations, Sarah Ruden for Virgil's Aeneid, and Richard Howard of course for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. Brought…...read more »

Publishing in Exile, German-language Literature in the U.S. in the 1940s

April 28, 2009

According to curator Paul North, never in history has there been an event on German publishers exiled by the Third Reich in one show. íOur task tonight is to bring a group of publishers into view,ë North said. íThe right to discourse was taken.ë The panel and show was revelatory,…...read more »

Roses and Sunshine and Books, What More Could You Ask For

April 25, 2009

Sant Jordi is Barcelona's Valentine's Day. Seven million Catalans went out and partied all day and all night. In the streets, on the brick and cobblestone, in lovers' and loved ones' arms. A 24 hour reading of Don Quixote (my kind of celebration!) persevered through the romantic playfulness. The mood…...read more »

The Undergound Aboveground

April 8, 2009

I am going to try to explain Oulipo. It is a thing which very seriously exists, and perhaps does not yet exist, because you he she they I have not yet exhausted all of its possibilities. If there is one thing I’ve learned this week it is that Oulipians are simultaneously the most serious and un-serious…...read more »

“We’re All Overgrown Adolescents”—Miriam Schlesinger and Philip Lopate talk about Etgar Keret

March 9, 2009

Last Thursday's Keret event at Idlewild was a hoot. Miriam Shlesinger's discussion about translating Keret's use of slang, though she is over twenty years his senior, (Keret is 42), was hilarious. "I cannot tell you how long I spent trying to decide between the word “chicks” versus…...read more »

My Nimrod Flipout

February 26, 2009

I remember the first time I came across Etgar Keret, and that I threw the book across the room. I had been beat to the punch. This marvel, this oracle, this as we say in Yiddish, this “meshuga” mind had figured out how to hybrid what felt to me a mix of Irvine Welsh, Amy Hempel, Kafka,…...read more »

We’re In This Together, Individually: Report from a Roundtable Discussion on “The World of the Trans

January 20, 2009

Poet Jorie Graham once said, "It is the poet's dream to communicate. To say what we're really saying." And if you think about how hard it is to truly come clean in your own sentence, your own work's paragraph, and then turn that into distilling another poet's communication, from another time, and another…...read more »