Ani Gjika

Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born poet, literary translator, writer, and author of Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize. Gjika moved to the U.S. at age 18 and earned an MA in English at Simmons College and an MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her translation from the Albanian of Negative Space by Luljeta Lleshanaku was published in 2018 by Bloodaxe Books in the UK where it was Poetry Book Society's Recommended Translation and by New Directions in the US where it was a PEN Award finalist for Poetry in Translation. She is also the translator of Kosovar poet Xhevdet Bajraj's play, Slaying the Mosquito (Laertes, 2017) and co-translator of his chapbook of poems, We Fall Like Children (Laertes, 2018). Gjika's honors include awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, English PEN, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, Framingham State University’s Miriam Levine Reader Award, and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize. Her poetry appears in Seneca Review, Salamander, Plume, From the Fishouse and elsewhere. Her translations from the Albanian appear in World Literature Today, Ploughshares, AGNI Online, Poetry, Catamaran Literary Reader, Two Lines Online, From the Fishouse and elsewhere.