North Carolina Poetry Society Awards Reading, Sept. 2015. Photo by Jeanne Julian.

Poet…

Poet and translator KATHERINE E. YOUNG served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Arlington, Virginia, from 2016-2018. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards (University of Arkansas Miller Williams Prize Series, 2014), named one of Split This Rock’s “eagerly anticipated” picks for 2014, one of Beltway Poetry‘s “Best Books of  2014,″ and an Honorable Mention for the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Award; and two chapbooks. Young’s poems, criticism, and reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, and many others. She was awarded a 2020 Arlington County Individual Artist Grant to compile and edit Written in Arlington, an anthology of 87 poets and over 150 poems about Arlington, Virginia, and its digital companion on YouTube, Spoken in Arlington.

Young has read her poetry at the Library of Congress and in U.S. venues from Massachusetts to Mississippi. She has read internationally at the Oxford (U.K.) Literary Festival, at English and Scottish venues from Cheltenham to Edinburgh, and in Moscow and Novosibirsk, Russia. 

… and Translator

Katherine E. Young won the 2022 Granum Foundation Translation Prize and was named the 2022 Pushkin House Translation Residency Awardee (UK). In 2017 she was named a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow for her work on a trio of novellas by Azerbaijani political prisoner Akram Aylisli, Farewell, Aylis. Her most recent translation, Look at Him, a memoir by Russia’s Anna Starobinets, was awarded Honorable Mention, Heldt Prize for Best Translation in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (2021). Young’s translation of Russian poet Xenia Emelyanova won third place in the 2014 Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender Prize competition. Her translations of work by poet Inna Kabysh won third place in the 2011 Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender Prize competition and were commended by the judges of the 2012 Brodsky-Spender Prize. A chapbook of poems by Inna Kabysh, Blue Birds and Red Horses, was published by Toad Press in 2018. A dual-language iPad edition of Kabysh’s poetry that includes both text and audio, Two Poems, was published by Artist’s Proof Editions in 2014. A full-length collection of Kabysh’s work, Children’s World, was named a finalist for the 2021 Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize, and the collection Cat and Mouse was named a finalist for the 2016 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. Young’s translations of Vladimir Kornilov appear in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. Individual translations have appeared in The Notre Dame Review, The White Review, Words Without Borders, and many others. In 2015 Young was named a Hawthornden Fellow (Scotland).

Young has been invited to lecture on translation and translation theory at the University of Oxford (U.K.), Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Pushkin House (U.K.), and at the Institut Perevoda (Moscow, Russia). Her translations have been read in Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, the U.S., and the U.K. Her writing on translation appears widely. She is a founding member, former co-director, and has served on the Advisory Board for the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT).

With Xenia Emelyanova, American Center, American Embassy, Moscow, Russia, 2016