Translation Series (3): Catherine Kim, Omar Khalifah, and Barbara Romaine, Sunday, May 18, 2025, 7pm
Join us Sunday, May 18, 2025, at 7pm at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) for the third event in the Translation Series, featuring Omar Khalifah, author of Sand-Catcher (Coffee House Press, 2024), and his translator Barbara Romaine, along with Denver-based author Catherine Kim. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments.
The event will include readings and interactive presentations investigating the role of witnessing and collective memory as well as writing-translating processes. Catherine will read from and present on her ongoing work on the May 18th Democratic Uprising in South Korea. Omar and Barbara will focus on Sand-Catcher, Omar’s novel featuring Palestinian journalists and a witness of the Nakba, a book Coffee House Press calls “a sardonic, thrilling fable about collective memory and the many ways it can be saved or subverted.” You can read more about it here.
Omar Khalifah is a Palestinian writer and academic. His most recent work Qabid al-Raml (Sand-Catcher), a novel, was published originally in 2020 and in English, in Barbara Romaine’s translation, in 2024 (Coffee House Press). His book Nasser in the Egyptian Imaginary was published in English by Edinburgh University Press in 2017 and his collection Ka’annani Ana (As If I Were Myself) was published in Amman, Jordan, in 2010. His articles have appeared in Middle East Critique and Journal of World Literature. A Fulbright scholar, Khalifah is an associate professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar.
Catherine Kim is a Korean Canadian writer studying in the United States. Her work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, Nat. Brut, the Transcendent series, the Nameless Woman anthology, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Sunburst Award. She earned an MFA at Brown University, where she received the Frances Mason Harris ’26 Prize, and is now a PhD student at the University of Denver, where she is a Clemens Fellow and a Prose Editor for Denver Quarterly.
Barbara Romaine taught the Arabic language, for about thirty years, at various institutions along the eastern seaboard. She has published seven full-length translations, beginning with Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery, by the Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher, in 1996. Her shorter translations (stories, poetry, essays) have appeared in assorted periodicals. She has held two NEA fellowships, the first in 2006 and the second in 2015; the first of these was to support the translation of Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour’s novel Specters, and in 2011, Specters was placed second in the competition for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
(Translation Series, generously funded by Denver Arts & Venues, is hosted by poupeh missaghi and Chenxin Jiang.)