We’re delighted to welcome Oxford Professor of Poetry A. E. Stallings and award-winning poet-translator Jeffrey Yang to Manchester Poetry Library for the third annual Manchester Translation Series. The event will include a poetry reading, along with a discussion on topics related to translation and the roles of literature in our current geopolitical moment. 

A.E. Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement. Stallings’s latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2022, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece. 

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections Line and Light (Graywolf Press, 2022), Hey, Marfa (Graywolf Press, 2018), Vanishing-Line (Graywolf Press, 2011), and An Aquarium (Graywolf Press, 2008). He is the translator of Bei Dao’s Sidetracks (New Directions, 2024); Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile (Phoneme Media, 2015), cotranslated with the author; Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies (Graywolf Press, 2012); Su Shi’s East Slope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008); and Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up (New Directions, 2017). He edited the anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems (New Directions, 2011), Time of Grief: Mourning Poems (New Directions, 2013), and the collection The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman (University Press of New England, 2017). Yang works as an editor at New Directions Publishing and the New York Review of Books. He lives in Beacon, New York. 

This event is part of the 2025 Manchester Translation Series.

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