Events Calendar

Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka will discuss their translation of, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, the first book of poems by the great Japanese surrealist to be published in English.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, from Princeton University Press. She has a BA and MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, a BA in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.

Yuki Tanaka was born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. His chapbook Séance in Daylight was selected by Sandra Lim for the 2018 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. He has also co-translated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. He received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University. 

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Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}