Translating and Publishing World Literature: Editors’ Roundtable to Feature U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze

On Tuesday, May 12 at 6pm cdt, join U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze, Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Kola Tubosun, and Daniel Simon for a lively Zoom conversation discussing their three newly launched books, with a focus on the urgency of literary translation. Registration is currently open for this free event.

Their new books include:

• Deep Vellum’s Best Literary Translations 2026 (forthcoming April 14), which Sze guest-edited and for which Anothai, Call, and Tubosun serve as series coeditors

• Restless Books’ A Compass on the Navigable Sea: 100 Years of World Literature (available now), edited by Simon to celebrate World Literature Today’s hundredth year of continuous publication

• Copper Canyon’s Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (forthcoming April 14), which Sze wrote to advocate poetry translation during his tenure as the twenty-fifth U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry

The Library of Congress announced Sze as the current Poet Laureate in September 2025. “As laureate I feel a great responsibility to promote the ways poetry, especially poetry in translation, can impact our daily lives,” Sze commented. “We live in such a fast-paced world: poetry helps us slow down, deepen our attention, connect and live more fully.”

As Anothai, Call, Tubosun, and Öykü Tekten note in their introduction to Best Literary Translations 2026, since the Trump administration declared English the official language of the United States in March 2025, translating a wider range of languages in opposition to linguistic hegemony becomes even more urgent. “Because language—unmoored, rethreaded, reimagined—carries what borders try to erase,” they write. “If there is hope here, it is not naïve. It is hard-won, multilingual, fragmented. It flickers, but persists. Even in collapse, there is chorus. And this is a chorus, not a canon.”

An excerpt from Transient Worlds and interview with Sze are featured in the March 2026 issue of WLT.

During the webinar, all three books will be available for discounted purchase by attendees. Click here to register.

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Noh Anothai’s translations range from classical Siamese poets to contemporary Thai authors. Anothai has also served as a judge for the Lucien Stryk Prize for Asian Literature in Translation and taught creative writing for almost a decade. Anothai received his PhD in comparative literature, on the track for international writers, at Washington University in St. Louis in 2023. 

Wendy Call is an award-winning nonfiction writer, translator of poetry, editor, and educator. The author of the award-winning nonfiction book No Word for Welcome, she is also coeditor of the craft anthology Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide and the annual Best Literary Translations anthology. She has translated (or co-translated) five collections of poetry by Indigenous Mexican poets. Working as an editor and educator, Wendy lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, on Mixtec and Zapotec land.

An award-winning editor, poet, translator, and essayist, Daniel Simon is the assistant director and editor in chief of World Literature Today and also serves on the English, International Studies, Judaic Studies, and PACS faculty at the University of Oklahoma. His poetry has appeared in three verse collections; three anthologies; been translated into six languages; and nominated for multiple awards. Nebraska Poetry (2017), which he edited, won a 2018 Nebraska Book Award and was included on NPR’s “50 States” summer booklist (2022). Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2020), which he also edited, is forthcoming in Chinese in 2026. His latest anthology, A Compass on the Navigable Sea: 100 Years of World Literature, was published in February 2026 by Restless Books.

Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He recently published his twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush (2025) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025). His other collections include The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems, selected for a National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award, and Sight Lines, for which he received the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. He has also published The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024). A recipient of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from Yale University, a Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, he is professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Kola Tubosun is a Nigerian linguist and polymath, publisher of OlongoAfrica, author of Edwardsville by Heart (2018), Ìgbà Èwe: Translated Poems of Emily R. Grosholz (2021), and Èṣù at the Library & Other Poems (2024). He is a Fulbright scholar (2009), Miles Morland Writing Fellow (2018), and Chevening Research Fellow at the British Library (2019/2020). He has translated the works of Chimamanda Adichie, Haruki Murakami, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, James Baldwin, Sarah Ladipo-Manyika, Cervantes, and others between English and Yorùbá. His work in language advocacy earned him the Premio Ostana Special Prize in Cuneo Italy in 2016. His documentary film Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory about Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has won a number of international film prizes, and is currently in use in over thirty tertiary institutions of learning worldwide.