Frances de Pontes Peebles is the author of the novels The Seamstress and The Air You Breathe. Her books have been translated into ten languages and won the Elle Grand Prix for fiction, the Friends of American Writers Award, and the James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Fellowship. Her second novel, The Air You Breathe, was a Book of the Month Club pick. Born in Pernambuco, Brazil, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction in Spring 2019. She has received a Fulbright Grant, Brazil’s Sacatar Foundation Fellowship, and was a Teaching Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her short stories and essays have appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Zoetrope: All-Story, Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Catapult, and Real Simple. Her novel, The Seamstress, was adapted for film and mini-series on Brazil’s Globo Network. She is proud to serve on the Board of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.

Nina MacLaughlin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she works as a carpenter. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she has written for the Believer, Bookslut, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Karan Mahajan grew up in New Delhi, India and moved to the US for college. His first novel, Family Planning (2008), was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. It was published in nine countries. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs (2016), was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Awards and was named one of the "10 Best Books of 2016" by The New York Times. Karan's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker Online, The New Republic and other venues. An assistant professor at Brown University, he is currently a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He is also the recipient of the 2019 Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer's Prize, "awarded annually to young writers of proven excellence in poetry or prose."

Rajesh Parameswaran is the author of I Am an Executioner: Love Stories, which The Washington Post praised as “the advent of a genuinely distinctive voice in American fiction.” Parameswaran’s stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, Five Chapters, and Fiction. “The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan” was one of three stories for which McSweeney’s earned a National Magazine Award in 2007, and it was reprinted in The Best American Magazine Writing. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and lives in New York City.

Reading from Homesick alongside Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept

Prescott won the 2016 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize for the first chapter of her gripping debut novel, which uses historical details to tell the story of Sally and Irina, two well-educated women who are sprung from the CIA’s typing pool to smuggle the manuscript of Dr. Zhivago out of the Soviet Union so it can be published. Intercutting Sally and Irina’s adventures—one is already an accomplished spy and the other is learning fast—with scenes from the lives of Pasternak and his beloved muse, Olga Ivinskaya, Prescott gives a vivid picture of Cold War-era politics and social mores.

The coming of age story of an award-winning translator, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood. 

Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy's first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results.

Lauren Goldenberg is Deputy Director at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A former book scout and bookseller, she is also a member of the Editorial Board of Jewish Currents.

Join us for our third annual Day of Translation co-presented with the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. All panels and events will take place on the George Mason University campus in Fairfax, Virginia.

All events are free and open to the public.

Writers and translators appearing include Jeffrey Angles, Natasha Bruce, Jennifer Croft, Boris Dralyuk, Shelley Frisch, Emily Getty, Mui Poopoksakul, and Jeremy Tiang, among others Forrest Gander will deliver the keynote address.

Stay tuned for more details and the full schedule of events.

Join four acclaimed authors honored by the 2018 National Book Awards for an engaging discussion on craft, recognition, and the vital importance of literature. Featuring writers working widely across subject and genre, the panel includes translator Jennifer Croft(Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, Finalist, Translated Literature), Victoria Johnson (American Eden, Finalist, Nonfiction), Raquel Salas Rivera (lo terciario / the tertiary, Longlist, Poetry), and Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Heads of the Colored People, Longlist, Fiction). Moderated by Lisa Lucas, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation.

Reading from Homesick featuring Marisa Silver with special guests Boris Dralyuk, translator of Amy’s translation, and my sister, Anne Marie Croft!

Marisa Silver is the author, most recently, of the novel, Little Nothing, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction. Her other novels include Mary Coin, a New York TimesBestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award, and an NPR and BBC Best Book of the Year, The God of War, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and No Direction Home. Her first collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. When her second collection, Alone With You was published, The New York Times called her “one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers.” Silver has been named The Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers for 2018-2019. In 2017, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker as well as other journals, and has been included in The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories. She teaches at The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.