Action Books: Forthcoming Titles

PoorLMcoverFINAL-01Spring 2016:
Kim Hyesoon trans. Don Mee Choi, Poor Love Machine
taylor jacob pate, Becoming the Virgin 
Fall 2016:
Jane Wong, Overpour 
Valerie Hsiung, exchange following and gene flow: a trilogy
Farid Tali trans. Aditi Machado, Prosopopoeia
Spring 2017:
Victor Rodríguez Núñez trans. Katherine Hedeen
Josué Guébo trans. Todd Fredson
Javier Etchevarren trans. Jesse Lee Kercheval, Fábula de un hombre desconsolado / Fable of an Inconsolable Man

About our authors:

Spring 2016: 

Kim Hyesoon is a prominent South Korean poet who has received numerous prestigious literary awards. She teaches creative writing at Seoul Institute of the Arts. Her work translated into English includes three titles from Action Books, Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014), All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011) and Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (2008), the chapbook When the Plug Gets Unplugged (Tinfish Press, 2005), and poems in the anthology Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Woman(Zephyr Press, 2006).
Don Mee Choi is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, April 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and translator of contemporary Korean women poets. She has received a Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (Action Books, 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. Her most recent works include a chapbook, Petite Manifesto (Vagabond Press, 2014), and a pamphlet, Freely Frayed,ㅋ=q, Race=Nation (Wave Books, 2014). She was born in Seoul and came to the U.S. via Hong Kong. She now lives in Seattle.

taylor jacob pate is a writer, painter & runner born in New Orleans & raised lots of other places. He received his MFA from The New Writer’s Project at UT Austin. Along with his partner Blake Lee Pate, he founded & edits Smoking Glue Gun.

Fall 2016:

Jane Wong holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a former U.S. Fulbright Fellow and Kundiman Fellow.  She is the recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Currently, she teaches at the University of Washington Bothell and the Richard Hugo House. The recipient of Meridian’s 2013 Editors’ Prize, poems have appeared in journals such as CutBank, Hayden’s Ferry Review, ZYZZYVA, The Volta, Salt Hill, and the anthologiesBest American Poetry 2015 (Scribner), Best New Poets 2012 (The University of Virginia Press) and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press). Her chapbooks include: Dendrochronology (dancing girl press), Kudzu Does Not Stop (Organic Weapon Arts), and Impossible Map (Fact-Simile). She is the author of OVERPOUR, which is forthcoming in 2016 (Action Books).

Poet, writer, editor, vocalist, and performer Valerie Hsiung is the author of three full-length poetry collections: efg (exchange following and gene flow): a trilogy (Action Books, forthcoming 2016), incantation inarticulate (O Balthazar Press, 2013), and under your face (O Balthazar Press, 2013). Her poetry, opera libretti, essays, and interviews can be found in numerous print and digital publications, including American Letters & Commentary, Apiary, Bone Bouquet, Denver Quarterly, Galavant Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, LOVEbook by SPZCE, Mad Hatters’ Review, Moonshot, New Delta Review, the PEN Poetry Series, RealPoetik, andVOLT, among elsewhere. Born in July in Cincinnati, Ohio, Hsiung spent significant portions of her childhood in Las Vegas, earned a BA from Brown University, and is now based out of Brooklyn, New York, where she works as a love detective for Tawkify.

Farid Tali is a French writer of Moroccan origin. In 1999 he published his first book, a collaborative journal with Renaud Camus titled Incomparable. His debut solo novella, Prosopopée, appeared in 2001 and is forthcoming in English translation from Action Books in 2016.

Aditi Machado is a poet and translator. Her first book of poems, Some Beheadings, is forthcoming from Nighboat Books, and her translation of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia will be published by Action Books. New work (poetry and prose) will appear in VOLT, Witness, The Capilano Review, FOLDER Magazine, The Chicago Review, and Almost Island. Aditi edits poetry in translation for AsymptoteShe is working on her doctoral dissertation, a creative-critical exploration of the sensuous intellect in landscape, at the University of Denver.

Spring 2017:

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955) is a poet, journalist, literary critic, translator, and scholar. Among his books of poetry are Cayama (1979), Con raro olor a mundo (1981), Noticiario del solo (1987), Cuarto de desahogo (1993), Los poemas de nadie y otros poemas (1994), El último a la feria (1995), Oración inconclusa (2000), Actas de medianoche I (2006), Actas de medianoche II (2007), tareas (2011), reversos (2011), deshielos (2013), and desde un granero rojo (2013). Anthologies of his work have come out in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, and Spain, most recently Cuarto de desahogo (2013), and desde un granero rojo: poesía reciente (2014). Book-length translations of his work have been published in Chinese, German, English, French, Italian, Macedonian, Serbian and Swedish, and a wide selection of his poems has appeared in another twelve languages. He has been invited to read his work in more than thirty countries. His most recent publications in English are With a Strange Scent of World: Early Poems (Diálogos, 2014) and thaw (Arc Publications, 2013). Translations into English of his work have appeared in Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, Circumference, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, New England Review, New Letters, The New York Quarterly, and Poetry, among many others. His poetry has long been the recipient of major awards throughout the Spanish-speaking world, including the David (Cuba, 1980), the Plural (Mexico, 1983), the EDUCA (Costa Rica, 1995); and in Spain, the Renacimiento (2000), the Fray Luis de León (2005), the Leonor (2006), the Rincón de la Victoria (2010), the Jaime Gil de Biedma (2011), and the Alfons el Magnànim (2013). In the eighties, he was the editor of Cuba’s leading cultural magazine, El Caimán Barbudo, where he published numerous articles on literature and film. He has compiled three anthologies that define his poetic generation, as well as another of 20th century Cuban poetry, La poesía del siglo XX en Cuba (2011). He has brought out various critical editions, introductions, and essays on Spanish American poets. With Katherine M. Hedeen, he has translated poetry from Spanish into English (Juan Gelman and José Emilio Pacheco, among others) and from English into Spanish (Mark Strand and John Kinsella, among others). He co-edits the Latin American Poetry in Translation series for the British publisher Salt and is the co-director of the Mexican literary journal, La Otra. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is currently Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.

Katherine M. Hedeen is a specialist in Latin American poetry and has both extensively written on and translated contemporary authors from the region. Her book-length translations include published collections by Rodolfo Alonso, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Marco Antonio Campos, Luis García Montero, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale. She is an associate editor of Earthwork’s Latin American Poetry in Translation Series for Salt Publishing and an acquisitions editor for Arc Publications.  She is the recipient of a 2009 and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Project Grant. She resides in Ohio where she is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.

Josué Yoroba Guébo, or Josué Guébo, is an Ivorian academic, poet and short-story writer, born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast on July 21, 1972. One of the major figures of poetry in Africa, Josué Guébo is a political and sensitive writer. He is the chairperson of the Ivoirian Writers’ Association (AECI) and the U Tam’si Prize, 2014.

Todd Fredson is the author of The Crucifix-Blocks (Tebot Bach, 2012), which won the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. My country, tonight, his translation of Ivorian poet Josué Guébo’s Mon pays, ce soir, will be published by Action Books in the fall of 2016. Think of Lampedusa, his translation of Guébo’sSonge á Lampedusa, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2017 as part of its African Poetry Book Series. Fredson’s poetry, translations, nonfiction, book reviews, and scholarship appear in American Poetry Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Gulf Coast, Poetry International, Warscapes, Matter: A Journal of Political Poetry and Commentary and other journals and anthologies. Prior to receiving his MFA from Arizona State University, where he began the international section of the literary magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fredson served in the Peace Corps. He lived in a village in the Ivory Coast for two years during the unrest that led to that country’s recent civil wars. He is currently a 2015-16 Fulbright Fellow to the Ivory Coast and an Edward W. Moses Fellow in the Creative Writing and Literature program at the University of Southern California. He is completing his doctoral dissertation titled “Ivoirité: The Aesthetics of Postcolonial Rupture in Contemporary Ivorian Poetry.”

Javier Etchevarren was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1979. He is the author of the poetry books Desidia(Yaugarú, 2009) and Fábula de un hombre desconsolado(Yaugarú, 2014). His poems will appear in América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets which is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press. His poems appeared or are forthcoming in Palabras errantes, American Literary Review, Blackbird, Notre Dame Review, the Colorado Review and Waxwing. His work has been featured twice on Poetry Daily. Fábula de un hombre desconsolado / Fable of an Inconsolable Man, translations by Jesse Lee Kercheval, is forthcoming from Action Books.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, fiction writer and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her latest translations include Invisible Bridge/ El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Fábula de un hombre desconsolado / Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren, which is forthcoming from Action Books.