Women writers dominate the literature written by Romanians in North America. Our literary series, turning the spotlight on this phenomenal wave of creativity, organized in partnership with Denver-based Bucharest Inside the Beltway, brings together the largest group of Romanian-American and Romanian-Canadian women writers we have ever assembled in the cyberspace. The program, co-curated with author and academic Cristina A. Bejan, offers a series of readings full of passion, truth and skill to match a time of tumult and reinvention.
The fourth episode features Romanian-American poet, translator, editor and cultural promoter Claudia Serea and Romanian-Canadian poet, dramaturg, translator and academic Diana Manole.
CLAUDIA SEREA’s poems and translations have been published in Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Malahat Review, Oxford Poetry, Asymptote, Gravel, and elsewhere. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Twoxism, a collaboration with visual artist Maria Haro (8th House Publishing, 2018) and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, 2016). Serea’s poem My Father’s Quiet Friends in Prison, 1958-1962 received the 2013 New Letters Readers Award. She won the Levure Littéraire 2014 Award for Poetry Performance, and she was featured in the documentary "Poetry of Witness" (2015). Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Arabic, and Farsi, and have been featured in The Writer’s Almanac. Serea is a founding editor of the National Translation Month, and she co-hosts The Williams Poetry Readings in Rutherford, NJ.
DIANA MANOLE is a Romanian-Canadian scholar, writer, and literary translator. In addition to nine books published in Romania, she has also translated or co-translated seven poetry collections from and/or into Romanian and one from Spanish into English, and co-earned second prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition with Adam J Sorkin. She holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto and teaches theatre, literature, and creative writing at universities in Canada. Diana’s collection of poems, Praying to a Landed-Immigrant God, is forthcoming from Grey Borders Books. In 2020, her translations of poems by Nora Iuga have been featured in Exchanges and Poet Lore (forthcoming) in the US, as well as in Arc Magazine and TransLit 12, forthcoming in Canada.
Next authors in the series: Clara Burghelea, Roxana Cazan, Anca Mizumschi, Adela Sinclair, Alina Ștefănescu, Lucia Cherciu, Amanda L. Andrei, Andreea Scridon.
Watch the previous episodes here:
Ep. 3 / Carmen Bugan and Alina Cumpan
The program is organized by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Bucharest Inside the Beltway with the support of NARPA - North American Romanian Press Association.