Persian Poetry in Translation

A celebration of Persian Poetry in Translation, with readings by translators Niloufar Talebi (Elegies of the Earth), Roz Shayan Naimi, and Roger Sedarat.

Niloufar Talebi is an author, translator, and interdisciplinary artist. She has spent most of the past two decades working on projects related to Ahmad Shamlou, including a memoir, an opera, the video-poem Funeral Address, and a TEDx Talk. Talebi is the editor and translator of Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World (North Atlantic Books), a Fulbright Scholar, and the recipient of translation prizes including a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for her translations of Shamlou’s poetry.

Roz Shayan Naimi is a poet, translator, and editor based in New York. She received an MFA from Columbia University in poetry and literary translation in 2024. Her translation of post-modern Iranian poet Mina Asadi's collection titled 'Who Casts the Stones?' is forthcoming with World Poetry Books.

Roger Sedarat, an Iranian-American writer and translator, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Haji as Puppet: an Orientalist Burlesque, which won the Word Work’s Tenth Gate Prize for a Mid-Career poet and was adapted for a staged performance with a grant from Atlantic Philanthropies. A recipient of the Willis Barnstone Prize for Translation, his renderings of classical and contemporary Persian have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is the author of Emerson in Iran: the American Appropriation of Persian Poetry (SUNY Press) as well as translator of Nature and Nostalgia in the Poetry of Nader Naderpour (Cambria Press)and These Garden Nights: Ghazals of Hafez (forthcoming, Word Works Press).