Books & Translations
“A well-informed, clear and attractively written introduction to the work of a difficult but important poet.” –Times Literary Supplement
“Artfully translated from Russian by poet and scholar Sarah Valentine.”
Finalist for the American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Award
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After finishing my PhD at Princeton, research opportunities let me stretch my interdisciplinary muscles. At Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion, I contributed a paper on cognitive poetics to a Templeton Foundation–funded Cognitive and Textual Methods seminar featuring mostly sociologists (and me). For my work on the intersections of race and gender, Princeton’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies named me to their Advisory Council from 2020 to 2024.
As an Andrew C. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, I joined scholars from across the world in the Cultures in Transnational Perspective program. My theories on Second-World postcolonialism and Russophonie inspired a few dissertations in the Slavic department and led me to research African postcolonial novels in Russian translation. Were anyone inclined, they could find these papers and more on JSTOR.
Expanding on my graduate work, I wrote Witness and Transformation, the first full-length study on Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi. His elegiac poems have inspired artists, composers, and poets around the world. You can read more about him here.
Recently, I have turned to crime. In 2020-2021 I attended Antioch University’s low-residency MFA program as a fiction writer. There I began my passion project, a Victorian-era murder mystery series featuring the sassy coroner and Black British detective Ivy Marwood. You can read an excerpt from Ivy’s adventures here. I keep up with all things murder and mayhem as a member of Sisters in Crime and Crime Writers of Color.