EventsThe New Social Environment#317

Publishing-in-Transit: New York Review Books

Editors and Writers in Conversation

Thursday, June 10, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Writer and NYRB editor Edwin Frank joins NYRB authors Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Eugene Ostashevsky in a conversation hosted by Cole Swensen. We conclude with a reading by the three featured writers.

In this Talk

Publishing-in-Transit is a new monthly series designed to celebrate editors, all of the often-unrecognized work that they do, and the community-based and conversational nature of contemporary innovative literary publishing. This is our first installment.

View our second installment featuring Tender Buttons Press →

View our third installment featuring New Directions →

View our (upcoming) fourth installment featuring Ugly Duckling Presse →

Edwin Frank

Author and editor Edwin Frank has published poems and essays in many journals and is the author of a book of poems, Snake Train. He is the editorial director of New York Review Books, which publishes the NYRB Classics and NYRB Poets series.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Photo by Forrest Gander

Poet, translator, editor, and anthologist Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947 and lives in Dehra Dun, India. He has published some 20 books, most recently Selected Poems and Translations (NYRB Poets); a translation (with Sara Rai) of Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Hindi short fiction Blue Is Like Blue (HarperCollins); and, as editor, The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose (Black Kite). His Songs of Kabir was published in NYRB Classics in 2011.

Eugene Ostashevsky

Photo by Hartwig Klappert

Born in Leningrad, in the former USSR, Eugene Ostashevsky emigrated with his parents at the age of eleven to the USA. He studied Comparative Literature at Stanford University, has also studied or worked at universities in Italy, Turkey, and France and today teaches literature at New York University. His book of poems The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi was published by the NYRB Poets series in 2017.

Cole Swensen

Photo by Anthony Hayward

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Award.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨