The Quarantine Tapes: A week-day program from Onassis LA and dublab. Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, the series chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic.

On episode 209 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by Forrest Gander. A poet with an incredible body of work, Forrest talks with Paul about grief, translation, and the challenge and importance of being able to share joy in times of suffering.

Paul and Forrest have a beautiful discussion on poetry, the environment, and much more, touching on the work of Barry Lopez, Jack Gilbert, and Bertolt Brecht. Forrest reads poems from his recent books, Be With and Twice Alive and explains his fascination with lichen and his work as a translator, including the moving experience of working on his upcoming translation of Carol Bracho’s poetry.

Born in the Mojave Desert in Barstow, California, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia and spent significant years with the poet CD Wright, in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico, Eureka Springs, AR, and Providence, RI. With CD Wright, he has a son, the artist Brecht Wright Gander. Forrest holds degrees in both geology and English literature. He lives now in northern California with the artist Ashwini Bhat. 

Gander’s book Be With was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Concerned with the way we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, his book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gander has collaborated frequently with other artists including photographers Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide, Raymond Meeks, and Lucas Foglia, glass artist Michael Rogers, ceramic artists Rick Hirsch and Ashwini Bhat, artists Ann Hamilton,Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, dancers Eiko & Koma, and musicians Vic Chesnutt and Brady Earnhart, among others. 

The author of numerous other books of poetry, including Redstart: An Ecological Poetics and Science & Steepleflower, Gander also writes novels (As a Friend; The Trace), essays(A Faithful Existence) and translates. His most recent translations are Alice Iris Red Horse: Poems of Gozo Yoshimasu, Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems and Fungus Skull Eye Wing: Selected Poems of Alfonso D’Aquino. His most recent anthologies are Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin American (selected by Raúl Zurita) and Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century.

Gander’s books have been translated and published in more than a dozen other languages. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. In 2011, he was awarded the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship. Gander was the Briggs-Copeland poet at Harvard University before becoming The Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University where he taught courses such as Poetry & Ethics, EcoPoetics, Latin American Death Trip, and Translation Theory & Practice. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and an elected member of The Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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