Poetry in Translation: Dzvinia Orlowsky & Nidia Hernandez

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart prize poet, an award-winning translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She’s published six poetry collections by Carnegie Mellon University Press including A Handful of Bees, Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones, and Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was selected by former national poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a 2019 winner of the New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize. Her award-winning co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2021. She is Writer-in-Residence at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Nidia Hernández was born in Venezuela, and has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet and translator of Portuguese poetry, editor, broadcaster, poetry curator, and radio producer. Nidia directs the editorial project lamajadesnuda.com, which won the 2011 WSA prize for Cultural Heritage. She curates Poesiaudio Arrowsmith Press Sundara Ramaswamy Prize 2021, for her assemblage of The Land of Mild Light, selected poems of Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas. She edited in 2022 The Invisible Borders of Time; Five Female Latin American Poets, and is a contributor for Mercurius Magazine. She has presented works drawn from the 34 years of her radio program (also called La maja desnuda) which has more than 1,768 broadcasts. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM in Valencia, Spain. In 2023 she was invited to serve on the board of the New England Poetry Club.