Translating the Self: Memory, Migration and Myth in East European Diasporas
Friday, March 6, 2026: 3:20 p.m. to 4:35 p.m. ET
Main Stage at the AWP Book Fair
Baltimore Convention Center
Annie Lulu. Of Congolese and Romanian origins, Annie Lulu is a prized novelist, poet and literary critic of French and English expression, living in the United States. In her novels, The Black Sea in the Great Lakes (Senghor Prize for Literature, 2021) and Grieving Fauna (Ecological Novel Prize, 2023) she chose to combat post-colonial realistic literary immobilism by playing with the frames of the African novel of initiation, introducing untranslated phrases, and mythological dimensions in her narratives.
Adela Sinclair. Born in Romania, raised in New York, Adela Sinclair carries the weight of silence, of the stories her family didn’t tell as in her new volume of poems “The Butcher’s Granddaughter.” She writes to reassemble herself in language when nothing else makes sense. Poetry is how she reparents the girl she was, how she buries her ghosts with tenderness. She writes from the threshold between memory and myth, between a Romania she left behind and a self she continues to reassemble in diaspora. Translating the self is her lived practice.
Domnica Radulescu is a Romanian American fiction writer, memorialist, scholar, author of three critically acclaimed novels that explore the themes of this panel: the experience of exile and reinvention of the self through memory, writing across languages and cultures, the translatability of the self in fiction. Her best-selling novel Train to Trieste was translated into 13 languages. Her new novel My Father's Orchards delves into Romania's folklore and the dark pages of its recent history.
Alina Stefanescu is a unique poetic voice of the Romanian diaspora in the United States. Her poetry collection Dor won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). In the collection, My Heresies (Sarabande, 2025), she has "translated" Romanian childhood myths into the present as spaces for ontology. She embraces a politics of memory and inheritance. She highlights the notion of “posthumous fidelity" to family members and how relationships are preserved through poetic texts.
Survivors of East European authoritarian regimes, genocidal wars or painful displacements from their native lands, carriers of personal and intergenerational traumas, the participants in this panel, all chose the United States as their home. This multi genre panel explores the creative processes and voices that emerge from the palimpsest of our diverse identities at the crossroads of migration, memory and myth and as we succeed or fail to translate our hyphenated selves into languages of exile.
We write from places of fracture, memory, loss, and reinvention. We belong dynamically to diverse geographies, cultural and linguistic universes. Our identities are as diverse as Afro-Jewish-Romanian, Romanian American. We are at the forefront of creating new literary languages. We bring the flavors of our forsaken native languages into our adopted ones. We dialogue with myths of past lives before the fall of the Soviet Union and are deeply rooted in our historical moment.
We will each read from our most recent works. Adela Sinclair will read from her newest volume of poetry The Butcher’s Granddaughter, Annie Lulu will read from her novel Grieving Fauna, Alina Stefanescu will read form her most recent volume of poetry My Heresies and Domnica Radulescu will read from her most recent historical novel My Father’s Orchards.