The Adam Mickiewicz University, Faculty of English, and the City of Poznań invite you to an open lecture by Proffessor Forrest Gander: "An Ecology of Intimacies: On Lichens & Eros", which will take place on 26 October (Thursday) at 17.45 in the Auditorium of the Heliodori Święcicki College, Grunwaldzka 6.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist and novelist. The poet was born on 21 January 1956, in Barstow, in the Mojave Desert, California. He grew up in the state of Virginia. He holds a bachelor's degree in geology from The College of William and Mary in San Francisco and a degree in literary studies from San Francisco State University. He has taught, inter alia, at Providence College and Harvard University. As a visiting professor, he taught the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1998. Since 2001, Forrest Gander was affiliated with Providence Brown University, where he worked as the director of the graduate program in the Department of Literary Arts and Literary Comparative Studies. In 2010, he was awarded the position of Adele Kellenberg Seaver Proffessor, which he held until 2018. Among the subjects he taught were poetry and ethics, ecopoetics, and the theory and practice of translation. Currently, Proffessor Gander holds the post of professor emeritus at the university.
Forrest Gander is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, two novels, a collection of essays and translations of poetry from Spanish and Japanese. His best-known volumes of poetry are Be with (2018), for which he was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2019. The Polish translation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning volume Be With, under the title Bądź Blisko, translated by Julia Fiedorczuk, was published in 2020 by Lokator publishing house. The poet's latest book Twice Alive will also be published in translation.The Polish title of the volume is Podwójne życie. Another critically acclaimed volume is Core Samples from the World (2011), which was a finalistfor two important American awards: The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gander is the author of the novels As a Friend and The Trace. Other important publications by the poet include volumes such as Eye Against Eye , which was created in collaboration with photographer Sally Mann, Torn Awake, Eiko & Koma, The Steepleflower and Science. Gander is the author of a collection of essays entitled: A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory and Transcedence (2005).
The poet is also the recipient of a number of prestigious grants, such as the United States Artists Rockefeller, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. In 2017, he became chancellor of the Academy of American Poets
He is the editor of an anthology of poetry from Spain, Mexico and Latin America. He has translated authors such as Pablo Neruda, Pura López Colomé, Coral Bracho, Valerie Mejer Caso and Alfonso D'Aquino. In collaboration with Kyoko Yoshida, Gander translated a selection of poetry by Japanese poet Kiwao Nomura entitled Spectacle & Pigsty. The latter translation earned him the Best Translated Book Award 2012;. In 2016, a selection of Yoshimasu Gozo's poems was also published under Gander's editorship, titled 'The Poems of Yoshimasu Gozo'. Alice Iris Red Horse. Together with Kent Johnson, he translated a selection of poems by Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz, titled The Night (Princeton, 2007), which won the PEN Translation Award. Translations of the Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda are included in the book The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (City Lights, 2004).
Recent translations include Coral Bracho's 'It Must Be a Misunderstanding', Shuri Kido's 'Names and Rivers' and 'Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems'.His most recent anthologies are Pinholes in the Night :Essential Poems from Latin American (selected by Raúl Zurita) and Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century.
Along with poet CD Wright, Forrest Gander was co-editor of the literary publishing house Lost Roads Publishers, which published writers and poets such as Michael Harper, Kamau Brathwaite, Arthur Sze, Fanny Howe, Steve Stern, Josie Foo, Frances Mayes, and Zuleyka Benitez.