Second Tuesday featuring Judy Halebsky and Nichole Turnbloom

JUDY HALEBSKY

Judy Halebsky is the author of five poetry collections, including  Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged), short-listed for the 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and  Sky=Empty, winner of the New Issues Prize. With Ayako Takahashi, she translated Since Fukushima by Wago Ryoichi.

Her honors include fellowships from MacDowell, Millay Arts, and the Japanese Ministry of Culture. At Dominican University of California, she teaches Japanese literature, poetry, and live storytelling. She lives in Berkeley with her nature guide and young daughter.

About Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged):

A translator’s notebook, an almanac, an ecological history, Judy Halebsky’s Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) moves between multiple intersections and sign systems connected in a long glossary poem that serves as the book’s guide to what is lost, erased, or disrupted in transition both from experience to written word and from one language, location, and time period to another.

Writers Li Bai, Matsuo Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, and Du Fu make frequent appearances in centuries ranging from the eighth to the twenty-first, and appear in conversation with Grace Paley, Donald Hall, and Halebsky herself, as the poet explores subjects ranging from work and marriage to environmental destruction. Asking what would happen if these poets—not just their work—appeared in California, the poems slip between different geographies, syntaxes, times, and cultural frameworks.

The role of the literary translator is to bring text from one language into another, working to at once shift and retain the context of the original—from one alphabet to another, one point in time to another. These are poems in homage to translation; they rely on concepts that can bridge time and space, and as a result are as likely to find meaning in donuts or Zumba as they are to find it in the ocean. Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) finds reasons for hope not in how the world should be, but in how it has always been.

“Halebsky likes the unleashed energy of poetry, and in the poems gathered here, she delivers.” —Billy Collins

NICHOLE TURNBLOOM

Nichole Turnbloom is the author of Out of the Unexpected: Poems with Sappho. She has an MFA in poetry and completed a facilitation training through the Institute for Poetic Medicine. Her poems have been published in Acumen, California Quarterly, The Branches, Garlic Press Lit, Luna Luna Magazine, Bear Review, IWWG’s Anthology Write Forward among other venues. Her work is informed by nearly twenty years of providing somatic therapy to those affected by complex trauma and delves into themes of spiritual fragmentation, identity and longing.