Saturday, October 24
6:00 pm and onward
ALTA afterparty at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop! Stop by the shop for a translation open mic and family style dinner, followed by readings by four Zephyr Press translators: J. Kates (Russian), Dan Rosenberg (Slovene), Karen Kovacik (Polish), and AKaiser (Catalan). Refreshments and the reading are free, $20 for the optional family-style dinner.
J. Kates, a minor poet and a literary translator, has published two books and three chapbooks of his own poems, and more than a dozen translations of Russian and French poetry. He has edited two anthologies of Russian translations and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. He was expelled from the board of directors of the New Hampshire Poetry Society for allegedly threatening another member, whom he has never met, with decapitation.
Dan Rosenberg co-translated Slovenian poet Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome, and his translation of Komelj’s new and selected poems, Night Is More Abstract, was just released by Zephyr Press in 2026. Rosenberg’s own poetry collections include Bassinet, cadabra, The Crushing Organ, and three chapbooks. His work has won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. A former Tompkins County Poet Laureate, Rosenberg currently co-hosts the Yetzirah Reading Series, serves as poetry editor for Pinyon, and teaches writing, literature, and translation theory at Colorado Mesa University.
Karen Kovacik, a poet and translator of contemporary Polish poetry, is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Grant to Poland and two translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her translation of Jacek Dehnel’s Aperture (Zephyr Press, 2018) was a finalist for the 2019 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. With Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Mira Rosenthal, she translated Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline (Zephyr, 2022). Kovacik is also the editor of Scattering the Dark, an anthology of Polish women poets (White Pine, 2016), and the author of three collections of poetry. Her poems and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Granta, World Literature Today, and others. A former Indiana Poet Laureate (2012-2014), she is Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University Indianapolis.
AKaiser is the Pushcart Prize-nominated author of <glint> (Milk & Cake Press) and an NEA-awarded translator of Catalan, French & Spanish. AK’s doctorate is in Translation & Intercultural Studies, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, under tutelage of Poet & Translator, Francesc Parcerisas. Poems, translations, photos and academic work have appeared in, among others, Allium, l’Avenç, Amsterdam Quarterly, Feral, Four Way Review, Ginosko, Harvard Review, MPT, with podcast, Pen + Brush: In Print, POETRY, Poetry International, and The Rumpus. "Astronaut, or Blues Singer" (<glint>) breathes in song thanks to Mel.lif.lu.ous. Translation of <Unnameable>, poems by Anna Gual (Zephyr Press, 2025). https://akaiser.org & @ak.approximations