San Diego Writers, Ink is pleased to host another reading presented by the San Diego State University MFA program, and featuring the internationally acclaimed poet Valzhyna Mort and SDSU alum Deniz Perin.
VALZHYNA MORT is an internationally acclaimed poet whose work has won awards and recognition in Germany, Slovenia, Ireland, Sweden, and many other countries. She is the recent winner of $100,000 Lannan Fellowship for 2009 and was the youngest person ever to be featured on the cover of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“A risen star of the international poetry world,” declares the Irish Times. Valzhyna Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus (former Soviet Union), in 1981, made her American debut in 2008 with a poetry collection Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press), co-translated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pultizer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright. Valzhyna writes in Belarusian at a time when efforts are being made to reestablish the traditional language, after governmental attempts to absorb it into the Russian language have been relinquished. She reads her poems aloud in both Belarusian and English.
She received the Crystal of Vilenica award in Slovenia in 2005 and the Burda Poetry Prize in Germany in 2008. She has been a resident poet at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany, and has received a fellowshiip at Gaude Polonia, Warsaw, Poland. She is a recipient of a 2009 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her English translations of Eastern-European poets can be discovered in the anthology, New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Factory of Tears has been translated into Swedish and German. She lives and teaches in Baltimore, Maryland.
Deniz Perin received an MFA in poetry from San Diego State University in 2007. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Atlanta Review, Art Access, Golden Handcuffs, Runes, and Sentence, and in San Diego Writers's Ink anthology, A Year in Ink, Volume 2. Recently, she was featured artist in the online journal, The Latent Print. Her translations of poetry and prose from the Turkish have appeared in several printed and online journals, including The Dirty Goat, Muse-Pie Press, The New Review of Literature, Poetry International (forthcoming), Transcript, and Words Without Borders. She was a 2007 recipient of the Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators. Her translation of Ece Temelkuran’s poetry collection, Book of the Edge, is forthcoming by BOA Editions, Ltd. in July 2010, and her translations of Nazim Hikmet’s poetry are included in the soon-to-be-released Ecco Book of International Poetry (Harper Collins, 2010). She teaches Literature and Writing at the University of San Diego.
VALZHYNA MORT is an internationally acclaimed poet whose work has won awards and recognition in Germany, Slovenia, Ireland, Sweden, and many other countries. She is the recent winner of $100,000 Lannan Fellowship for 2009 and was the youngest person ever to be featured on the cover of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Deniz Perin received an MFA in poetry from San Diego State University in 2007. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Atlanta Review, Art Access, Golden Handcuffs, Runes, and Sentence, and in San Diego Writers's Ink anthology, A Year in Ink, Volume 2. Recently, she was featured artist in the online journal, The Latent Print. Her translations of poetry and prose from the Turkish have appeared in several printed and online journals, including The Dirty Goat, Muse-Pie Press, The New Review of Literature, Poetry International (forthcoming), Transcript, and Words Without Borders. She was a 2007 recipient of the Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators. Her translation of Ece Temelkuran’s poetry collection, Book of the Edge, is forthcoming by BOA Editions, Ltd. in July 2010, and her translations of Nazim Hikmet’s poetry are included in the soon-to-be-released Ecco Book of International Poetry (Harper Collins, 2010). She teaches Literature and Writing at the University of San Diego. 
