Zell Visiting Writers Series: Reading and Q&A with Sawako Nakayasu
Join us in welcoming poet and artist Sawako Nakayasu for a reading and Q+A as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series, presented by the Helen Zell Writer’s Program in partnership with UMMA, with support from the Department of English Language & Literature.
Born in Japan and raised in the US, Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation. Her newest books of poetry include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker award, and Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020), both of which engage the intersection between writing and translation. Settle Her, which was written on the #1 bus line in Providence, Rhode Island on Thanksgiving Day of 2017 on the occasion of her cutting ties with normative Thanksgiving celebrations, is forthcoming from Solid Objects.
Zell Visiting Writers Series readings and Q&As are free and open to the public and will be offered both virtually (via Zoom) and in person (in UMMA’s Stern Auditorium). Seats are offered on a first come, first served basis; please arrive early to secure a spot.
For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email kimjulie@umich.edu–we are eager to help ensure this event is inclusive to you.
More About Sawako Nakayasu
Sawako Nakayasu is a poet and artist. Her “Invisible Losses,” a text-based performance, was performed in 2023 as part of Translated Bodies, a translation performance event curated by Gabrielle Civil at the Velocity Dance Center in Seattle. Her pamphlet, “Say Translation Is Art” (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), which encourages the untethering of translated texts from conventional relationships to their source texts, has been taught, translated, or performed in the US and in Europe – including as a spoken word performance by Danielle Zawadi in Dutch translation, at the Dutch Foundation for Literature’s Annual Translation Convention in 2022. Nakayasu teaches in the Literary Arts department at Brown University, where she teaches poetry, translation, and interdisciplinary art.