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Friedman Selected for NEA Fellowship

English Department Lecturer Jeff Friedman and co-translator Dzvinia Orlowsky have been recommended for an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship of $12,500. The Fellowship will support the translation into English of a collection of poems by Mieczysław Jastrun, considered to be one of the most important Polish poets of the years between the two world wars. Friedman and Orlowsky were awarded one of only 20 fellowships for 2016. In total, the NEA plans to distribute $275,000 in this round to support the new translation of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry from 11 different languages into English.

Jeff Friedman has published six volumes of poetry (five with Carnegie Mellon University Press), including Pretenders and Working in Flour. His poems, flash stories and translations have been published in numerous literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poetry International, Antioch Review and the New Republic. He has been the recipient of many awards including two artist fellowships from the New Hampshire Arts Council, the Missouri Review Editor’s Award, and the Milton Dorfman Poetry Award.

Pushcart Prize recipient and Founding Editor of Four Way Books, Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of five collections of poetry published by Carnegie Mellon University Press including A Handful of Bees, reprinted in 2009 as a Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary; Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones, recipient of a 2010 Sheila Motton Book Award; and her most recent, Silvertone, for which she was named Ohio Poetry Day Association’s 2014 Co-Poet of the Year.

Mieczysław Jastrun was born in Korolówka, Poland, in 1903. Over his lifetime he published more than a dozen books of poetry along with other volumes of essays, a memoir, and translations from German, Russian and French literature into Polish. His collection Memorials was translated into English by Friedman and Orlowsky and published by Dialogos Press in 2014.

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