Translation Series (4): Translation Symposium, with Stine An, paparouna, Lizzie Davis, and Anni Liu, Saturday, November 15, 2025, 5pm–7:30pm
Join us Saturday, November 15, 2025, from 5pm-7:30 7pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) for the fourth event in the Translation Series, a translation symposium featuring Sine An, paparouna, Lizzie Davis, and Annie Liu. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments.
PANEL ONE, QUEERING TRANSLATION & OUR TEXTS, 5pm-6pm
What does it mean to create a faithful, fluent, and beautiful translation, and how might these ideals shift when we’re working with queer and marginalized texts? This conversation explores what it means to queer the practice of translation: to resist normative ideas of fidelity and authorship, and to imagine translation as a counter-hegemonic space of experimentation, virtuosity, and play.
paparouna will introduce prominent perspectives and strategies for queering texts and writing from the margins, showing how rigid adherence to conventional translation and literary norms can fail us when it comes to queer and minoritized texts.
Stine An will share techniques she employed to queer her English translation of Yoo Heekyung’s Today’s Morning Vocabulary, reflecting on how literary translation has shaped her relationship to language, gender, and identity.
Together, the speakers invite participants/audience to reconsider translation as an ongoing act of linguistic, political, and personal transformation and resistance.
6-6:30 break
PANEL TWO, TRANSLATION & EDITING IN THE WORLD OF INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING, 6:30pm–7:30 pm
Taking the context of independent publishing as a starting point, this reading and conversation will focus on translation and editing as inherently creative, collaborative practices that complicate the notion of singular authorship. What emerges when translation is understood as a kind of writing within constraints, or editing as a form of intimate conversation? How do the many hands that carry a text from manuscript to finished book make publishing a social practice?
Stine An is a poet, literary translator, and performer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Best Literary Translations, Best American Experimental Writing, Poem-a-Day, Words Without Borders, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard College and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and is the recipient of fellowships and grants from The Poetry Project, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Yaddo, ALTA, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her publications include Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press, 2025), S_MMER CR_SH (Sarabande Books, 2025), and Comet & Star written by Lee Juck and illustrated by Lee Jinhee (Enchanted Lion Books, 2024). Her debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite, is a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her interdisciplinary work explores diasporic poetics, experimental translation, and virtual performance. You can find her online @gregorspamsa.
Born and raised in Athens, Greece, paparouna currently resides in occupied Arapahoe and Cheyenne territory in so-called Colorado, USA, writes queer speculative prose, translates mostly queer Greek literature into English, and daydreams about life as a marine mammal. An MFA Candidate in Translation and Fiction at Antioch—Los Angeles, paparouna was accepted into the 2018 Princeton Hellenic Translation Workshop, the 2018-2020 Lighthouse Book Project, the 2025 Bread Loaf Translators Conference, and the 2025 British Center for Literary Translation Summer School. They serve as the Lead Translation Editor for Lunch Ticket. Their writing has been published in Progenitor, Asymptote, Exchanges, New Poetry in Translation (now World Poetry Review), Denver Quarterly, Timber, The Thought Erotic, Lunch Ticket, and World Literature Today.
Lizzie Davis is a writer, an editor, and a translator from Spanish and Italian. Her translations include Juan Cárdenas’s The Devil of the Provinces (longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature) and Ornamental (finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize), as well as work by Valeria Luiselli, Daniela Tarazona, Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, and Elena Medel. She is the executive editor at Transit Books, following nearly a decade at Coffee House Press.
An editor at Graywolf Press, Anni Liu acquires and edits fiction and nonfiction that takes bold risks on the level of style and content. Her list has an international focus—from translations to those writing in English all over the world. Books she’s worked on include Owlish by Dorothy Tse (translated by Natascha Bruce), Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott), and I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà (translated by Mara Faye Lethem). She is also the author of the poetry collection Border Vista (Persea Books) and occasionally translates from Mandarin Chinese.
(Translation Series, generously funded by Denver Arts & Venues, is hosted by poupeh missaghi and Chenxin Jiang.)