Poetry is always an act of translation: taking a deeply personal vision and finding the words and sounds that allow this experience to take shape in another mind, across the divide of language, nationality and identity.
That’s something that Binghamton University alumna Mona Kareem knows well. She first published her poetry as a teenager in Kuwait, and has continued to write in both English and Arabic. After earning her master’s and then her PhD in comparative literature, she has also gone on to translate the work of other authors, and recently received a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowship in Literature Translation.