MISSION
Poets & Traitors Press is an independent publisher of books of original poetry and translations by a single author/translator. Poets & Traitors seeks to showcase authors who travel between writing and translation, artists for whom Language is made manifest through languages and whose own word carries, shapes, and is shaped by that of another.
Poets & Traitors views translation as forming part of a continuum with the creative writer’s work. Most poetry presses and contests explicitly forbid the inclusion of any translated work, while the handful of independent presses that publish translations are not concerned with translators as writers. Poets & Traitors aims to demolish this wall between writing and translation by publishing books that cultivate a dialogue between the two—books that combine poetry and translations by one writer-translator.
HISTORY
Since 2013, the Poet/Translator Reading Series has showcased the work of such writer-translators as Matvei Yankelevich, Liz Wessel Clark, Eugene Ostashevsky, Johnny Lorenz, Ian Dreiblatt, Ainslie Morse, Bela Shayevich, and Margarita Shalina. Beginning in 2014, the series has also hosted the final readings of the New School Literary Translation Workshops. These workshops have been comprised of writer-translators working from Arabic, Modern Hebrew, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Albanian, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish, Odia, and Ukrainian. These workshops are alternately led by Val Vinokur and Tony Anemone and form the core of the Minor in Literary Translation at The New School.
CONTACT
For all queries and requests, please email poetstraitors [at] gmail.
SUPPORT
Poets & Traitors acknowledges support from Stephanie Browner, Melissa Friedling, Raúl Rubio, Alex Draifinger, Jane McNamara, Laura Thorne, Eugene Lang College, the Bachelor’s Program for Adults and Transfer Students, and the New School Foreign Languages Department.