Last month, as part of the Writers at Queens reading series, poet and translator Richard Prins visited the Rosenthal Library at Queens College for a celebration and reading of his chapbook We May Eat Fruit, which was recently awarded the Birdhouse Award. The event included a discussion between Prins and Peter Vanderberg, the Editor-in-Chief of Ghostbird Press.
Prins began the evening by outlining his literary development as a poet and translator. “Poetry is my background. Translation is all relatively new. I did a [Master of Fine Arts] in poetry, and I used to write a ton of poems. I put together these big, huge, messy books, and sent them out to contests, but I never heard anything,” he said.
While working on final projects for a graduate class, he realized that what he had been calling “books” were actually just unorganized piles of poems. This led him to adopt a chapbook format for his works. He said, “the chapbook was better for me because it presented a cohesive vision of a project rather than an arbitrary gathering of disparate works.”
Prins highlighted the creative coherence of the chapbook format, especially when it is used with visual art. The conversation also touched on how Prins’s other work as a translator has shifted his original writing process. Though he previously viewed translation, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction as unrelated, he said he learned to blend them together during his graduate program. “It was kind of a revelation,” he said. “I started working more with found texts, and that made a big difference in how I approached both writing and translation. It blurred those lines in a good way.”
The evening served as an acknowledgement of the vital role that small presses and literary awards can play in advancing new voices. The Birdhouse Prize, co-presented with Ghostbird Press and the Queens College MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, also recognizes its strongest graduating students. In Vanderberg’s words, “awards like this are a sign of the commitment and craft of those within the Queens College writing community.”
