Presented By: Zell Visiting Writers Series
Craft Lecture by Sawako Nakayasu
Zell Visiting Writers Series
Login here (no pre-registration needed): https://tinyurl.com/ZellWriters24
Zell Visiting Writers Series readings and Q&As are free and open to the public and will be offered both virtually (via Zoom) and in person (in UMMA's Stern Auditorium). Seats are offered on a first come, first served basis; please arrive early to secure a spot.
Sawako Nakayasu says "The Anti-Craft Lecture" "will [be] a loose and improvisational extended-utterance on the beloved tradition of writing against the grain of a fixed, perfected, polished, beautiful, or finely crafted poem, in praise of poetry that is bad, ugly, unsellable, punk, incomplete, mediocre, unpublishable and of no discernible quality by standard measures."
Born in Japan and raised in the US, Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation. Her newest books of poetry include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker award, and Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020), both of which engage the intersection between writing and translation. Settle Her, which was written on the #1 bus line in Providence, Rhode Island on Thanksgiving Day of 2017 on the occasion of her cutting ties with normative Thanksgiving celebrations, is forthcoming from Solid Objects.
“Invisible Losses,” a text-based performance, was performed in 2023 as part of Translated Bodies, a translation performance event curated by Gabrielle Civil at the Velocity Dance Center in Seattle. It has also been reimagined and published as a web-based work on oral.pub. Her pamphlet, Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), which encourages the untethering of translated texts from conventional relationships to their source texts, has been taught, translated, or performed in the US and in Europe – including as a spoken word performance by Danielle Zawadi in Dutch translation, at the Dutch Foundation for Literature’s Annual Translation Convention in 2022.
Nakayasu’s translation of the Japanese modernist poet Sagawa Chika, The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, supported by the NEA and published by Canarium Books in 2015, received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and was a finalist for the National Translation Award in Poetry. It was subsequently acquired by Penguin/Random House for their Modern Library series and republished in 2020 in a new edition with updated introduction. Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering, currently under development with the Brown Digital Publications Initiative, is a born digital, scholarly publication based on Sagawa’s poetry and legacy.
Nakayasu teaches in the Literary Arts department at Brown University, where she teaches poetry, translation, and interdisciplinary art.
For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email kimjulie@umich.edu--we are eager to help ensure that this event is inclusive to you. The building, event space, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. A lactation room (Angell Hall #5209), reflection room (Haven Hall #1506), and gender-inclusive restroom (Angell Hall 5th floor) are available on site. ASL interpreters and CART services at in-person events are available upon request; please email kimjulie@umich.edu at least two weeks prior to the event, whenever possible, to allow time to arrange services.
U-M employees with a U-M parking permit may use the Church Street Parking Structure (525 Church St., Ann Arbor) or the Thompson Parking Structure (500 Thompson St., Ann Arbor). There is limited metered street parking on State Street and South University Avenue. The Forest Avenue Public Parking Structure (650 South Forest Ave., Ann Arbor) is five blocks away, and the parking rate is $1.20 per hour. All of these options include parking spots for individuals with disabilities.
Zell Visiting Writers Series readings and Q&As are free and open to the public and will be offered both virtually (via Zoom) and in person (in UMMA's Stern Auditorium). Seats are offered on a first come, first served basis; please arrive early to secure a spot.
Sawako Nakayasu says "The Anti-Craft Lecture" "will [be] a loose and improvisational extended-utterance on the beloved tradition of writing against the grain of a fixed, perfected, polished, beautiful, or finely crafted poem, in praise of poetry that is bad, ugly, unsellable, punk, incomplete, mediocre, unpublishable and of no discernible quality by standard measures."
Born in Japan and raised in the US, Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation. Her newest books of poetry include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker award, and Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020), both of which engage the intersection between writing and translation. Settle Her, which was written on the #1 bus line in Providence, Rhode Island on Thanksgiving Day of 2017 on the occasion of her cutting ties with normative Thanksgiving celebrations, is forthcoming from Solid Objects.
“Invisible Losses,” a text-based performance, was performed in 2023 as part of Translated Bodies, a translation performance event curated by Gabrielle Civil at the Velocity Dance Center in Seattle. It has also been reimagined and published as a web-based work on oral.pub. Her pamphlet, Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), which encourages the untethering of translated texts from conventional relationships to their source texts, has been taught, translated, or performed in the US and in Europe – including as a spoken word performance by Danielle Zawadi in Dutch translation, at the Dutch Foundation for Literature’s Annual Translation Convention in 2022.
Nakayasu’s translation of the Japanese modernist poet Sagawa Chika, The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, supported by the NEA and published by Canarium Books in 2015, received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and was a finalist for the National Translation Award in Poetry. It was subsequently acquired by Penguin/Random House for their Modern Library series and republished in 2020 in a new edition with updated introduction. Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering, currently under development with the Brown Digital Publications Initiative, is a born digital, scholarly publication based on Sagawa’s poetry and legacy.
Nakayasu teaches in the Literary Arts department at Brown University, where she teaches poetry, translation, and interdisciplinary art.
For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email kimjulie@umich.edu--we are eager to help ensure that this event is inclusive to you. The building, event space, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. A lactation room (Angell Hall #5209), reflection room (Haven Hall #1506), and gender-inclusive restroom (Angell Hall 5th floor) are available on site. ASL interpreters and CART services at in-person events are available upon request; please email kimjulie@umich.edu at least two weeks prior to the event, whenever possible, to allow time to arrange services.
U-M employees with a U-M parking permit may use the Church Street Parking Structure (525 Church St., Ann Arbor) or the Thompson Parking Structure (500 Thompson St., Ann Arbor). There is limited metered street parking on State Street and South University Avenue. The Forest Avenue Public Parking Structure (650 South Forest Ave., Ann Arbor) is five blocks away, and the parking rate is $1.20 per hour. All of these options include parking spots for individuals with disabilities.
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