Jonathan Stalling and Sawako Nakayasu, moderated by Haun Saussy (University Professor, University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations)
Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include Pink Waves (forthcoming, Omnidawn), Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (forthcoming, Wave Books), The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), and the translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals, a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor of A Transpacific Poetics (Litmus Press), a gathering of poetry and poetics engaging transpacific imaginaries, as well as of a forthcoming anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry, co-edited with Eric Selland (New Directions). She teaches at Brown University.
Jonathan Stalling is the author of Poetics of Emptiness (Fordham), Grotto Heaven (Chax), Yingelishi: Sinophonic Poetry and Poetics (Counterpath), and Lost Wax: Translation through the Void, and is the co-edited The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (Fordham) and By The River: Contemporary Chinese Novellas (Oklahoma), and the translator of Winter Sun: Poety of Shi Zhi (1966-2005) which was a finalist for the National Translation Award. His opera Yingelishi (吟歌丽诗) was performed at Yunnan University in 2010, and Stalling was the first non-Chinese Poet in Residence of Beijing University, and Poet in Residence of Hongcun (Huangshan, Anhui, China) in 2015. Stalling is the Founder and Curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive (Bizzell Library) which houses about 10,000 volumes from the Arthur Waley and Howard Goldblatt Collections and 10,000+ archival materials from Waley, Goldblatt, as well as Wolfgang Kubin, Wai-lim Yip and soon to be others. He is also a founding Editor of Chinese Literature Today magazine (Routledge) and CLT book series(University of Oklahoma Press) and the "21st Century North American-Chinese Literature Research and Translation Series” (21世纪北美中国文学研究著译丛书) published by Chinas Academy of Social Sciences Press. He is Professor of English at Oklahoma University.