Language English Name J. Kates Genre Poetry, Translations Role Poet | Spouse Helen Safronsky Kates Education Wesleyan University Children Stanislav, Paula Books Metes and Bounds | |
Occupation Poet, Editor, Translator Notable works Mappemonde (Oyster River Press)
Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing)
The Old Testament (Cold Hub Press)
The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books) | ||
James George "Jim" Kates (born 1945 in White Plains, New York) is an American poet, literary translator, and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation for the Selected Poems of Mikhail Yeryomin (White Pine Press, 2014). He has published three chapbooks of his own poems: Mappemonde (Oyster River Press) Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing) and The Old Testament (Cold Hub Press) and a full book, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books). He is the translator of The Score of the Game and An Offshoot of Sense by Tatiana Shcherbina; Say Thank You and Level with Us by Mikhail Aizenberg; When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree and Secret Wars by Jean-Pierre Rosnay; Corinthian Copper by Regina Derieva; Live by Fire by Aleksey Porvin; Thirty-nine Rooms, by Nikolai Baitov; Genrikh Sapgir’s Psalms — and Muddy River, a selection of poems by Sergey Stratanovsky. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of four books of Latin American poetry.
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Career
Since 1997, with Leora Zeitlin, Kates has co-directed Zephyr Press, a non-profit literary publishing house that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. He was the president of the American Literary Translators Association.
Life
Kates grew up in Elmsford and White Plains, New York. He attended Hackley School in Tarrytown and graduated from White Plains High School in 1963. He volunteered for the Mississippi Summer project after his freshman year at Wesleyan University in 1964, helping to implement a special court order encouraging voter registration in Panola County. In the fall of 1964, he organized a Friends of the SNCC/COFO in Paris, France, to support the work of the American civil-rights movement. He returned to America in 1965 to work in Natchez, Mississippi. He later became a public school teacher, a non-violence trainer for interpersonal and political movements, and a poet and literary translator.
He is married to Helen Safronsky Kates. They have two children, Stanislav (1986) and Paula (1994).