Mihaela Moscaliuc was born and raised in Romania, and came to the United States in 1996 to complete graduate work in American literature. Her poetry collection, Father Dirt (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award) appeared from Alice James Books in 2010,
and her co-translation of Carmelia Leonte’s Death Searches for You a Second Time was published by Red Dragonfly Press in 2003. Her translations of Romanian poetry appear in Arts & Letters, Mississippi Review, Connecticut Review, America, Absinthe, and Mid-American Review. She has published poems, reviews, and articles in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, New Letters, Poetry International, Pleiades, Interculturality and Translation, Soundings, and Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics (Frankfurt: Lang, 2009). She teaches at Monmouth University and in the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation at Drew University.---------
I arrived to poetry late in my life, after leaving Romania, and through a series of circumstances that replaced my apprehension toward language with awe for its sensual and militant resourcefulness, its affronts to intellectual and emotional torpor. I started writing because the process helped me make sense of my life as act of translation, and while I still write mostly out of this sense of pure necessity, I read poetry for reasons and pleasures that are as diverse as the works of the poets and translators gathered here. Each poem mediates or sustains an encounter with some "other" or sense of otherness—located in language, culture, craft, imagination—that invites some degree of (self)recognition while surprising, consoling, or provoking.
Gratitude to the poets and translators hosted here, and Bine aţi venit! dear readers.
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Follow THIS LINK for a complete listing of all the contributors in this month's Featured Guest Editor poetry column.