Longfellow Summer Festival: Poetry in Translation with Kymm Coveney and J. Kates

Kymm Coveney was born in Boston, raised in Scituate, and has lived in Spain since the 1982 World Cup. The pandemic caught this free-lance writer and translator sheltering in Jamaica Plain, where she now spends the summer months, far from Barcelona’s heat. History of Milk, Kymm’s translation of award-winning novelist Mónica Ojeda’s poetry collection, will be published by Coffee House Press in 2026. Several poems have been published online, and Section V “De Quincey’s Botany” is forthcoming in The Georgia Review‘s fall issue. Her non-fiction translations include Forest Bathing, by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, and Tokyo Sketchbook, by Amaia Arrazola, both with Tuttle Publishing.

J. Kates, a minor poet and a literary translator, has published three chapbooks of his own poems and two full books, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books) and Places of Permanent Shade (Accents Publishing). He has been granted three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, has translated a dozen books of Russian and French poetry, and edited two anthologies of Russian translations. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association and a co-director of Zephyr Press, he is also the co-translator of six books of Latin American and Spanish poetry.