2018

Words from the Fire:
Poems by Jidi Majia

Translated by Jami Proctor Xu
Series Editor Frank Stewart

Words from the Fire is a collection by Jidi Majia, a poet of the Nuosu (Yi) people of southwest China’s Sichuan Province. One of China’s most celebrated ethnic minority writers, he writes about the mythic world and cultural beliefs of the Nuosu people, and is deeply concerned with the urgent problems of global strife and the potential for peace among nations that can be achieved through poetry.

Also in this issue is "Personal Identity, Group Voice, Human Awareness," the text of a speech he gave at the 2017 Xu Zhimo Poetry and Art Festival, held at Cambridge University in the UK.

Jidi Majia’s writing has been translated into over twenty languages and distributed in more than thirty countries. He is the recipient of numerous international awards, including the 2014 Mkiva Humanitarian Award from South Africa, the 2017 Bucharest Poetry Prize, and the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award of Xu Zhimo Poetry Prize from King’s College Cambridge.

Translator Jami Proctor Xu studied Chinese at the University of California, Berkeley, before moving to Beijing in 2008. She is a recipient of a 2013 Zhejiang Poetry Award for a non-Chinese poet who has made a contribution to contemporary Chinese poetry. She has been a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a writer-in-residence at the Chengdu Gao Di artists village.

The art consists of photographs of shamanic Nuosu objects, including scrolls, drawings, and a mesh bag. All images appear courtesy of the Burke Musem of Natural History and Culture, at the University of Washington. The fleurons appearing in the contents section and with the poems are from Mountain Patterns: The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China, a book by Stevan Harrell, Bamo Qubumo, and Ma Erzi.

Becoming Brazil:
New Fiction, Poetry, and Memoir

Guest-Edited by Eric M. B. Becker
and Noah Perales-Estoesta
Series Editor Frank Stewart

When Dom Pedro I declared Brazilian independence in September 1822, he could not have known that the newly liberated country would one day become a nation of 200 million citizens. Becoming Brazil: New Fiction, Poetry, and Memoir presents new translations of work by and about the vibrant people of this fascinatingly diverse and rapidly changing country.

Although Brazil is by far the largest and most populous nation in South America—with approximately the same landmass as the US—Brazilian literature, art, and culture are little known in countries where Portuguese is not spoken. But within Brazil, contemporary artists and avant-garde writers are helping to form a national identity that takes into account the nation’s disparate regions, customs, indigenous people, immigrants, dialects, and social and racial inequalities. 

Becoming Brazil includes works by canonical twentieth-century Brazilian writers, innovative contemporary authors, and new voices, many of them in translation for the first time. The volume also includes stunning images by two of Brazil’s best photographers.

For interviews and a complete list of the contributors, please see the Brazil blog.

224 pp., summer 2018 (30:1), $25
ISBN 978-0-8248-7978-5
Project Muse
ebook edition

240 pp., winter 2018 (30:2), $25
ISBN 978-0-8248-8169-6
Project Muse
ebook edition