David Shook

David Shook lives in Los Angeles, where he serves as founding editor of Phoneme Media, a nonprofit publisher of world literature in translation. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma and the University of Oxford, he’s visited over 50 countries performing his writing, and his work has been translated into French, Isthmus Zapotec, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Swedish, Uyghur, and other languages. His debut collection, Our Obsidian Tongues, was longlisted for the 2013 Dylan Thomas Prize, and his recent translations include work by Mario Bellatin, Tedi López Mills, and Víctor Terán. He served as Translator in Residence for the Poetry Parnassus in 2012, part of London’s Cultural Olympiad, featuring a poet from every participating olympic nation, where he premiered his covertly filmed short documentary Kilómetro Cero, about persecuted Equatorial Guinean poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang. He is a contributing editor to Ambit (UK), Bengal Lights (Bangladesh), and World Literature Today. His current projects include a novel called White Lobster, translations of Jorge Eduardo Eielson and Conceição Lima, and an anthology of narcocorridos. He was recently named an NEA Translation Fellow for 2017.