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Chaos, Crossing

Olivia Elias

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Kareem James Abu-Zeid is a translator, editor, writer, teacher, and scholar who works across multiple languages. As an acclaimed translator of Arabic literature, he works with prominent English-language publishing houses to introduce the writings of Arab poets and novelists to a broad audience, seeking to promote Arabic literature in the US and around the world. While he enjoys translating all kinds of texts, he is particularly fond of Arabic poetry. Kareem has received numerous awards, fellowships, honors, and residencies for his work as a translator and a scholar, including PEN Center USA's 2017 Translation Prize, the 2022 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation, a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts translation grant, the 2015 Northern California Book Award for Best Translated Poetry, Poetry Magazine's 2014 translation prize, a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Germany, a CASA Fellowship in Cairo, and residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff Centre for the Arts. A full list of his awards is available ﻿here﻿. As a freelance professional translator from Arabic, French, and German into English, he has produced hundreds of texts since 2003: books, essays, movie subtitles, plays, poems, speeches, and more, covering such wide-ranging topics as art history, Islam, Buddhism, genetics, politics, and particle physics. As a professional editor of American and British English, he has worked on an equally broad array of topics and genres for institutions and individual clients around the globe. He has edited hundreds of texts since 2004, and many full-length books. Most recently (from 2015 to 2017), he worked as a freelance Senior Translating Editor for a book project with MoMA. Kareem is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice (Resources in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Lockwood Press, 2021). BackgroundKareem received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California Berkeley in 2016, with a dissertation on Poetry as Spiritual Practice. He earned a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley in 2007, and a Bachelor’s Degree summa cum laude in French with a minor in German from Princeton University in 2003. At Princeton (and afterwards), he was mentored in translation by the late American poet CK Williams. Kareem was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Germany in 2003/4, and a CASA Fellow in Egypt in 2005/6. He brings a scholar’s rigor to his translations and his editing work, and has taught university courses in four different languages (English, Arabic, German, and French) and led workshops on translation, writing, literature, philosophy, and language in Europe, the Middle East, and the US.​Half American and half Egyptian, Kareem was born in Kuwait in 1981, and has lived an itinerant life across the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the US. Since 2012, he has been an avid meditation practitioner, and spends a couple months each year on retreats, studying and practicing under teachers from different lineages and traditions in the US and in India. He recently spent several years traveling around the world and working remotely, with southern India being his main base. Since 2018, however, he has been based in the countryside outside of Santa Fe (New Mexico, USA), where he lives with his wife and young stepson. He frequently gives readings, lectures, and translation workshops at various institutions across the US and around the world.

Kareem James Abu-Zeid

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