For my second translation community, I recently discovered another bookstore/collective similar in mission to Mil Mundos, yet oriented specifically around Chinese-speaking and Asian diasporic writers. Founded by Na Zhong (translator of several Sally Rooney novels into Mandarin) and Jiaoying Li,…
Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative
For this blog post, I want to highlight an initiative right here at the Graduate Center that, in my experience, most students don’t know enough about, but everyone should: CUNY’s very own Lost & Found Poetics Document Initiative, a mini-press…
Where Pierogis Meet Punk
In 1904, the Polish National Home purchased an old bar and bowling alley and transformed the space into a Greenpoint neighbourhood cultural center. Walk in any night in the last century, a guest would find smoked-filled rooms, trays of pierogis…
Codes Unknown
Recently my partner and I went to see Code Unknown or Code Inconnu (2000) directed by Michael Haneke, and the film became a simulacrum of multilingualism which we return to so often in class. The original film is in French,…
Language Use as Political Signifier
Recently, I was eating my favorite noodles from Spicy Village in the park when I started really looking at a building I’ve seen hundreds of times. Was that Karl Marx carved in stone? It was. This is the Forward Building,…
AAVE Academic Paper Example
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “SHOULD WRITERS USE THEY OWN ENGLISH?” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by LAURA GREENFIELD and KAREN ROWAN, University Press of Colorado, 2011, pp. 61–72. JSTOR, https://doi-org.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/10.2307/j.ctt4cgk6s.7. Accessed 20 Mar. 2026.
Albertine Translation Prize
I was invited to be the “Master of Ceremony” for this year’s Albertine Translation Prize. At the event we hosted “translation jousts” which featured two translators displaying their translations of the same passage alongside the original. It was an interesting…
Kilomba Collective – New York City
They say that to be introduced to yourself, to unlearn and relearn your culture, you sometimes need to leave it. You need to move to a different country, speak another language, and learn a new way and a new rhythm…
Living Los Sures
In 1984, filmmaker Diego Echeverria created a documentary time capsule of 1980s life in Los Sures, or the “southside” neighbourhood of Williamsburg. The central figures in his film are members of the Puerto Rican and Dominican enclaves of New York…
Hiya, I’m Jenn
I am an MFA Candidate at the poetry program at Brooklyn College. My first semester, I took a Translation workshop with Mónica de la Torre and, inspired, I wanted to learn more. Unfortunately, Brooklyn doesn’t offer much in the way…
