With our next Read to Me event, we feature Chloe Garcia Roberts and Coco McCracken in conversation over the topic of shared obsession.
This event is free and open to the public. Must be 21+ to enter.
Doors and bar at 6pm
Conversation + q&a 7pm - 8pm
The bar will open until 9pm or so.
Coco McCracken is a Chinese-Canadian author and writer living in Portland, Maine. Her chapbook, The Rabbit, was selected by bestselling author Melissa Febos as the winner of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’s 2021 Maine Chapbook Series. She was the recipient of a 2022 Ashley Bryan Fellowship. She was named a Lit Fest Fellow by the MWPA, in which capacity she helped organize the state’s first inaugural Maine Lit Fest. She also serves on the Community Advisory Board for the MWPA. She was accepted for a residency for the 2022 summer season at Hewnoaks, where she was additionally awarded a grant from the Maine Arts Commission to complete her first manuscript. In 2023, she was chosen to be on the jury for the Maine Literary Awards. Her work has been featured in Wirecutter’s (The New York Times) Baby + Kid Section, Maine Magazine, and Copy Mag, among others.
Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from the Spanish and Chinese. She is the author of a book of poetry, The Reveal, which was published as part of Noemi Press’s Akrilika Series for innovative Latino writing and her second book, Fire Eater: A Translator's Theology is forthcoming in 2024. Her work has appeared in such publications as the Yale Review, BOMB, Conjunctions, and the Kenyon Review. She lives outside Boston and works as deputy editor of Harvard Review, translation editor for the Harvard Library Bulletin, and as a lecturer of poetry at MIT.
Her translations include Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes (New Directions), which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and a collected poems of Li Shangyin published in the New York Review Books / Poets series. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA fellowship in translation for her translation of the novel Carne de Dios by Mexican author Homero Aridjis (forthcoming from University of Arizona Press in 2025).
Her translations of children’s literature include Cao Wenxuan’s Feather (Archipelago Books/Elsewhere Editions) which was an USBBY Outstanding International Book for 2019, and Decur’s When You Look Up (Enchanted Lion) which was named a Best Children’s Book of 2020 by the New York Times. Her most recent translation, The True Story of a Mouse Who Never Asked for It by Ana Christina Herreros was also named a Best Children’s Book
of 2021 by the New York Times.