Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
People and Places
Roe attends convention
Wanda Roe of Pea Ridge recently attended the international convention of Delta Kappa Gamma International in Austin, Texas. Roe, a past state president and member of five international committees, sang in the 200-member chorus. She is a 50-year member of the society, which is a professional group of educators.
National Endowment
The National Endowment for the Arts recently awarded sevaral local poets and translators with grants to support their work.
Kaveh Bassiri of Fayetteville received the Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency and the Sturgis International Fellowship. The fellowship will support the translation from the Persian of a collection of poems by Iranian poet Roya Zarrin. The poetry of Roya Zarrin, born in 1972, explores her experiences growing up in a time of war and the daily difficulties faced by Iranian women. The translated collection will include poems from two of Zarrin’s
multi-awardwinning volumes:
I Want to Swallow My Children and Pleasant Tricks of
April. This translation will be one of the first Englishlanguage books from a post-revolution Iranian poet. Bassiri’s translations have been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, Two Line Online and the Massachusetts Review. His own poetry has won the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award and been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Review, Mississippi Review and Best New Poets 2011.
Oksana Maksymchuk of Fayetteville, a philosophy instructor at the University of Arkansas, works in collaboration with Max Rosochinsky. Her fellowship will support the translation from a Ukrainian anthology of poems by Marianna Kiyanovska. Kiyanovska, born in 1973, is one of the bestknown writers and influential women in Ukraine’s cultural sphere. This proposed anthology will draw on the poems Kiyanovska wrote between 2013 and 2017, a turbulent time of conflict in Ukraine. Kiyanovska became actively involved with humanitarian efforts then, regularly visiting hospitals and shelters in occupied regions and overseeing the distribution of necessities as well as books; she also hosted a refugee in her own home. Her poems from this period reflect these complex emotional experiences.
Her translations from Ukrainian and Russian have appeared in such publications as the Best European Fiction series, London Magazine, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation and Poetry International. She is co-editor of the anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017).
Recognizing the importance of helping more readers gain access to works of world literature, the National Endowment for the Arts awards $325,000 in Literature Translation Fellowships to 25 translators to bring voices and stories from 17 countries to English-speaking readers.