Words Without Borders Announces 2021 Poems in Translation Contest
Winning Poems to Be Published in Poem-a-Day and WWB
We’re pleased to announce the 2021 WWB Poems in Translation Contest spotlighting groundbreaking work by poets and translators around the world.
The contest is open to submissions of contemporary international poetry translated from other languages into English. Four winning poems will be co-published in Words Without Borders and Poem-a-Day, the popular daily poetry series produced by the Academy of American Poets, throughout September, which is National Translation Month. The winning poems will be selected by
Airea D. Matthews, along with the editors of Words Without Borders.
Northwestern Now
‘For My People’ was written by Northwestern alumna Margaret Walker Alexander
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Northwestern English professor Natasha Trethewey, two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007, introduced a special collaborative remix of the seminal poem “For My People,” a civil rights anthem written in 1937 by Northwestern alumna Margaret Walker Alexander.
A collaboration between PBS American Portrait and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Arts, of which Trethewey is co-chair, the project invited Americans to submit their own lines inspired by “For My People.” The Academy enlisted members including John Lithgow, Yo-Yo Ma, Ken Burns and Henry Louis Gates to record parts of the poem.