Monday @ KGB: Bill Zavatsky & Ron Padgett

Bill Zavatsky has published translations of Robert Desnos in The Sienese Shredder, in the Random House Book of Twentieth-century
French Poetry, and in Essential Poems
and Writings of Robert Desnos. His translation of Valery Larbaud’s The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth (with Ron
Padgett) was reissued in a revised edition this year. His translation of Earthlight: Poems by André Breton (with
Zack Rogow) won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. His own
poetry appears in the anthologies The
Face of Poetry, Up Late, and Present Tense. Where X Marks the Spot, his latest collection of poetry, came out
in 2006 from Hanging Loose Press. He has written poems as liner notes for jazz
pianists Bill Evans and Marc Copland, most recently Copland’s Voices, with Gary Peacock and Paul
Motian, and Night Whispers, with Drew
Gress and Bill Stewart. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry for
2008-2009. Bill teaches English at the Trinity School in Manhattan.

Ron Padgett’s recent books include How to Be Perfect (poems), You
Never Know (poems), If I Were You
(collaborative works), and two memoirs, Oklahoma
Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers and Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard. Padgett is also the editor of The Handbook of Poetic Forms as well as
the translator of Blaise Cendrars' Complete
Poems and Guillaime Apollinaire's Poet
Assassinated. He has collaborated with artists such as Jim Dine, Alex Katz,
George Schneeman, and Joe Brainard. Padgett has received Fulbright, NEA,
Guggenheim, and Civitella Ranieri grants and fellowships, and was named Officer
in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. Recently he was
elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His translation (with Bill
Zavatsky) of Valery Larbaud's Poems of A.
O. Barnabooth was published in 2007 by Black Window Books. For more
information, go to http://www.ronpadgett.com.

For the complete KGB spring lineup, click here.