EventsThe New Social Environment#1078

Publishing-in-Transit: Litmus Press

Featuring Omar Berrada, E. Tracy Grinnell, Safaa Fathy, and Cole Swensen

Thursday, May 30, 2024 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Litmus Press Board President Omar Berrada, Executive and Artistic Director E. Tracy Grinnell, and poet Safaa Fathy join Rail contributor Cole Swensen for a conversation.

In this Talk

Omar Berrada

Photo by Ilze Wolff

Omar Berrada is a writer, curator, and translator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa (2016); La Septième Porte, a posthumous history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020); and Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (2024). His writing was included in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, The University of California Book of North African Literature, and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. He currently lives in New York.

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E. Tracy Grinnell

Photo by Norma Cole

E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Hell Figures (Nightboat Books, 2016), and portrait of a lesser subject (Elis Press, 2015), among others. With Isabelle Garron, she is the translator of way by Leslie Scalapino into French (Éditions Corti 2020). Her poetry, essays and visual art have also appeared in a wide range of collections and publications, including BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing, edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris. Grinnell’s poetry has been translated into French, Serbian, Polish, and Portuguese. She has taught creative writing at Pratt Institute, Brown University, and in the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and is the Founding Editor and Executive & Artistic Director of Litmus Press.

Safaa Fathy

Safaa Fathy was born in Egypt. She is a poet, essay writer, and filmmaker. Her recent publications include Where Not to Be Born, translated by Rawad Z. Wehbe and presented in English and Arabic (Litmus Press, 2024) and Al Haschische (Pamenar Press, 2023), an experimental book of poems. Her plays Terror and Ordeal (Lansman, 2004) were prefaced by Jacques Derrida, with whom she signed the book Tourner les mots (partly translated into English by Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania). Safaa Fathy’s Name to the Sea, a film-poem structured within a still frame, is being published along with the text in seven languages (Vanilla planifolia, Mexico City). She has been writing a novel in English for the past five years.

http://safaafathy.org/en/

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 🌈✨