Claudia Serea

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-born poet who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have been published in journals and anthologies from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and Ireland, such as Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Gravel, The Malahat Review, carte blanche, Going Down Swinging, The Lake, Ambit, Banshee Lit, among others. Her poem My Father’s Quiets Friends in Prison, 1958-1962 received the New Letters Readers Award in 2013. Serea’s most recent book is Twoxism (8th House Publishing, Montreal, Canada, forthcoming), a poetry-photography collaboration with visual artist Maria Haro. Serea’s other full-length poetry collections include Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, Canada, 2012), A Dirt Road Hangs from the Sky (8th House Publishing, Canada, 2013), To Part Is to Die a Little (Cervená Barva Press, 2015) and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, 2016). She also has published the chapbooks The Russian Hat (White Knuckles Press, 2014), The System (Cold Hub Press, New Zealand, 2012), With the Strike of a Match (White Knuckles Press, 2011), and Eternity’s Orthography (Finishing Line Press, 2007). Together with Paul Doru Mugur and Adam J. Sorkin, Serea co-edited and co-translated The Vanishing Point That Whistles, an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House Publishing, 2011). She also translated from the Romanian Adina Dabija’s Beautybeast (Northshore Press, Alaska, 2012). In 2012, Serea co-founded and she currently edits National Translation Month. In 2015, Claudia Serea was featured in the documentary Poetry of Witness alongside Carolyn Forché, Bruce Weigl, Duncan Wu, and others. The Economist featured an interview with Claudia Serea on its culture blog Prospero. Serea was short-listed for the 2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical poem The Dictionary, and, in 2014, the poems from the sequence My Father’s Quiet Friends in Prison, 1958-1962 were featured in several short videos presented at international movie festivals. She also won the 2014 Award for Poetry Performance, Levure Littéraire (France) and the 2013 New Letters Readers Award for the poem My Father’s Quiet Friends in Prison, 1958-1962. Claudia Serea belongs to the poetry group The Red Wheelbarrow Poets and is one of the curators of the Williams Poetry Readings at the Williams Center in Rutherford, New Jersey. She writes, translates, and edits on her daily commute between New Jersey and New York.