Celebrate National Poetry Month with Brookline Booksmith! Join Third Thursdays Poetry, a monthly reading series at Brookline Booksmith, and the Transnational Literature Series for an in-store event with Alex Braslavsky, Jennifer Jean, and Nandana Dev Sen to discuss poetry and translation.

This event was originally scheduled for Thursday, 4/20, and has been postponed to Friday 4/21.

This event will feature the following poet-translators: 

Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is a doctorate student in the Slavic Department at Harvard University, where she writes scholarship on Russian, Polish, and Czech poetry through a comparative poetics lens. Her work on Polish literature has been supported by the Jurzykowski Polish Grant and the ©POLAND Translation Program. Her translation of On Centaurs & Other Poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka was released by World Poetry Books in February of 2023. She will be reading from On Centaurs & Other Poems, the first selected volume in English of Zuzanna Ginczanka, a visionary Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish poet of the inter-war years whose life was cut short by the Holocaust. 

Jennifer Jean's poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. She has received honors, residencies, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Her Story Is collective, the Academy of American Poets, the Kolkata International Poetry Festival, and the Women's Federation for World Peace, among others. She edits poetry for Talking Writing and translations for Consequence Forum. She is the senior program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center's online writing program. She will be reading from her new collection VOZ, an amped-up recollection of her triste fado, or “sad fate,” in Los Angeles after a childhood spent in foster care.

Nandana Dev Sen is a writer, actor and child-rights activist. She has starred in 20 feature films, authored six children's books (translated into more than 15 languages globally) and translated two collections of poetry by her mother, the acclaimed Bengali writer Nabaneeta Dev Sen. As an ambassador, Nandana has worked with UNICEF, Operation Smile, and Apne Aap International, to fight against child abuse. She has also served on the jury of numerous child-rights commissions, international literary awards, and film festivals. Nandana is Child Protection Ambassador for Save the Children India, a global Author Advocate for Girls' Education for Room to Read, and a Director of the Women’s Refugee Commission, New York. She will be reading her translations from  Acrobat, a radiant collection of poetry about womanhood, intimacy, and the body politic, by Nabaneeta Dev Sen.