Translation Series (2): Jennifer Shyue, Sunday, April 20, 2025, 5pm

Join us Sunday, April 20, 2025, for the second event in the Translation Series, featuring Jennifer Shyue. The event takes place at 5pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver). Free and open to the public.

Jennifer Shyue will read an updated version of her essay “Mother’s Tongue” and perform a multi-media piece featuring her translations from Spanish of poems by the late Julia Wong Kcomt. The event will conclude with reflections alongside Chenxin Jiang on mother(’s) tongues and what translation is for.

Born into a tusán (Chinese Peruvian) family in Chepén, Peru, writer Julia Wong Kcomt (1961–2024) traveled from an early age, and her perceptions of country borders, different cultures, and diversity in ethnicity and religion became a strong motivation to write. She was the author of nineteen volumes of poetry, including Oro muerto and the posthumous El libro aún no escrito sobre las mariposas; eight books of fiction, including Mongolia and Aquello que perdimos en la arena; and three collections of hybrid prose.

Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish and an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse. Her work has appeared most recently in The Margins, the New York Times, and Send Me Press’s broadside series, and has received support from the Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities, English PEN, the Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt’s poetry collections A Blind Salmon and Vice-royal-ties, as well as Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, which received the ALTA First Translation Prize. She can be found at shyue.co.

Chenxin Jiang is a literary translator based in Denver. Her most recent translation is for now I am sitting here growing transparent (Zephyr Press, 2025), a book of poems by Yau Ching.

(Translation Series generously funded by Denver Arts & Venues.)