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UPCOMING EVENTS
Zack will be in residence at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France during October 2023. Zack will be reading his poems at Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles on November 3, 2023, with writers Lynne Thompson and Michelle Bitting. PAST EVENTS Zack’s coauthored play Colette Uncensored was performed at the Salihara LIFEs Festival in Jakarta, Indonesia in August 2023, and later in Yogyakarta. Zack also took part in a panel discussion at the festival with authors Johary Ravaloson and Jean-Baptiste Phou, and co-taught a workshop on “Writing and Presenting Personal Monologues” at the University of Indonesia. Zack appeared on a panel on “Literary Fame: Should We Seek It? Should We Care about It?” at the AWP conference in Seattle in March 2023. Zack chaired a panel at the Fête de Colette, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of the writer Colette, at the Mechanics' Institute Library in San Francisco, January 2023. His coauthored play Colette Uncensored was performed at the celebration. Zack took part in a tribute to Salman Rushdie at the Libreria Ubik in Bologna, Italy, on September 29, 2022. Zack read in Florence, Italy, on October 1, 2022, with a group of poets from Italy and the U.S.A. Zack read from his most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies, in August 2022 at Massy Arts in Vancouver, Canada. The reading also featured Tess Gallagher and Gary Copeland Lillley. In July 2022, Zack read at Bird & Beckett Books in San Francisco. Judith Serin also read, debuting her new book of fiction, Gravity. The video is here, and Zack's reading starts at 8:35 into the video. Zack’s coauthored play about the French writer Colette, Colette Uncensored, was revived in March 2022 at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco. The one-woman show was performed by coauthor Lorri Holt. The play was also performed in March 2022 near Barcelona, translated into the Catalan language. Zack’s play about the Senegalese president/poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, La Vie en Noir, had a staged reading at the Valdez Theatre Conference in Alaska in June 2021, read by Kim Estes and directed by Mildred Lewis. Zack was featured on the online TV interview program New Thinking Allowed, speaking on "Surrealism and Spontaneity." Zack was interviewed for the Hive Poetry Collective radio program. Charlotte Casiraghi, woman of letters and fashion model, recommended Zack's translation of the novel Green Wheat by Colette in her list of favorite summer reading. Zack took part in a virtual salon hosted by the Dora Maar House in France where he read and discussed his poems. The access code is: 2F=?4@mK. Zack appeared on the podcast A Conspiracy of Lemurs, hosted by Regal House Publishing. Zack's podcast on hiking in nature during the coronavirus shelter-in-place order is available from KQED radio. Zack's cotranslation of Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe can now be ordered from Peter Lang Publishing. The novel is about a Jewish actress who hides her identity during the Nazi occupation of France. Irreverent Litanies, Zack's ninth book of poems, was published by Regal House. The poems grapple with spirituality from the standpoint of someone who grew up in a militantly atheist home, but comes to value a meditative perspective. Zack wrote the lyric for the song “A Love for Just Part" that jazz vocalist Carrie Wicks recorded on her CD Reverie. Nick Allison composed the music for the collaboration. Carrie is also performing a song based on a translation that Zack did of a poem by Anna Akhmatova. Zack did a series of events to celebrate the publication of his cotranslation of the novel Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe, including readings from the book by the actor Danielle Levin at the Workers Circle in New York, the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco, and the Peninsula Jewish Community Center. Zack judged the 2020 Catamaran Poetry Prize for a book of poems by a writer from the West Coast of the USA, selecting In the Time of Great Fires by Alison Luterman as the winner. Zack taught the class Around the World with Six Poets through Catamaran Literary Reader in October and November 2020 Zack gave a craft talk on "Sculpting the Poem" at the virtual Catamaran Writers Conference in July 2020. Zack was a featured writer during the summer residency of the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College in Massachusetts in July 2019. Zack judged two poetry book prizes in 2019. For the Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast writers, he selected Susan Browne's collection Just Living. He also judged the Terry J. Cox Poetry Award, a prize for a first book of poems from Regal House Publishing, won by Martha Kalin, for How to Hold a Flying River. Zack did several readings in April 2019 from his new book of poems, Irreverent Litanies: Mechanics Institute Library, San Francisco; Folio Books, San Francisco; The Book Loft, Columbus OH. Zack chaired a panel titled “Translators Are the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World” at the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) in Portland, Oregon, in March 2019. Colette Uncensored, the play that Zack coauthored with actor Lorri Holt, ran in London at the Canal Café Theatre in 2018; had a developmental reading in New York City in February 2018, hosted by Nora's Playhouse theater; and ran during the AWP conference in Portland, Oregon, in 2019. Zack gave several readings in Italy in 2018, including at the Caffe Letterario Le Murate in Florence, and at The American Corner in Trieste. From mid-April to mid-May 2018, Zack was in residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, working on a volume of selected translations of poems from several languages and countries. On February 22, 2018, Zack spoke to students in literary translation and creative writing at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He spoke on “Falling in Love with a Book: Literary Translation as an Intimate Relationship.” Zack also read recent poems. Zack was a guest writer at the residency of the MFA in Writing at Dominican University in San Rafael, California, in January 2018. He spoke on a panel on literary translation and gave a poetry reading with Jane Hirshfield and Dan Bellm. In January 2018, Zack conducted a webinar on how to get started as a literary translator. The webinar is now available on YouTube. Zack read his poems and spoke at the First Asian Literature Festival in Gwangju, South Korea, from November 1 to 4, 2017. Zack was interviewed by the online translation magazine Intralingo. He talked about the joys and pitfalls of translation, collaborators, and favorite projects. Zack appeared on the radio show Desert Island Jazz. DJ Alisa Clancy interviewed Zack on station KCSM in San Mateo, California, about his new book of poetry, Talking with the Radio: poems inspired by jazz and popular music. Zack played some of his favorite jazz and folk tunes and read and sang poems. The audio of the show is posted on YouTube. |