Rika Lesser & Denise Newman

RIKA LESSER is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Questions of Love: New & Selected Poems and a revised edition of Etruscan Things. She has translated more than a dozen collections of poetry or fiction for readers of all ages, among them works by Göran Sonnevi, Gunnar Ekelöf, and Claes Andersson from Swedish and Rafik Schami, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Hermann Hesse from German. Her honors include the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Award in Poetry, The Landon Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Commission fellowship, a 2001 NEA Translation Grant, and two Translation Prizes from the Swedish Academy. Her translation of Sonnevi’s Mozart’s Third Brain was a finalist for the PEN Poetry Translation Award (2010).
With the support of a 2013 NEA Translation Grant, Lesser has completed her translation of Elisabeth Rynell’s novel Hohaj. The Brazen Plagiarist, her co-translation of a volume of selected poems by Kiki Dimoula, with the Greek scholar, critic, and translator Cecile Inglessis Margellos, first published in 2012 by Yale University Press, came out in paper this year and received the Greek National Translation Prize. A master teacher of poetry and literary translation, she is also a Guild-Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner and makes her home in Brooklyn Heights.

DENISE NEWMAN is a poet and translator living in San Francisco. Her poetry collections are: The New Make Believe (The Post-Apollo Press, 2010), Wild Goods (Apogee Press, 2008), Human Forest (Apogee Press, 2000). She is the translator of the novel Azorno by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen (New Directions, 2009), and The Painted Room, also by Christensen (Harvill Press 1996, distributed by Random House UK). This year she received an NEA Literature Fellowship for Translation to complete her translation of the short story collection Baboon by the Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt, which will be published by Two Lines Press in the fall. She teaches in the writing programs at the California College of the Arts.