Kristen Renee Miller Reads from Spawn

Today, we’re delighted to share another reading with you, this time by editor, poet, and translator Kristen Renee Miller. Miller translated Marie-Andrée Gill’s recently published collection, Spawn, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Québec. Joshua Whitehead, award-winning author of Jonny Appleseed, writes that “Marie-Andrée Gill’s Spawn is an epic journey that follows the ouananiche in their steadfast ability to hold: rigid, shimmering, hardened to the frigid waters of winter, in all of its capacities of and for whiteness.” Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf, praises Miller’s translation, writing that “in any translation there are three texts: the original, the translation, and the text that exists in the gulf between them. What makes Kristen Renee Miller’s translations of Marie-Andrée Gill so remarkable is the way that third ghost-text seems at times to step into our field of vision.”

We hope you enjoy the following reading, and we encourage you to stay tuned for more on the blog! You can also follow us on Instagram.

Kristen Renee Miller’s poems and translations have appeared in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Common, Guernica, and Best New Poets 2018. She is the translator of Spawn (Book*hug, 2020), by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the American Literary Translators Association, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is the managing editor for Sarabande.