About Shook

Shook is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, and editor. Their debut collection Our Obsidian Tongues was longlisted for the 2013 International Dylan Thomas Prize; poems from that book have been translated into Arabic, French, Isthmus Zapotec, Kurmanji, Japanese, Macedonian, Mandarin, Sorani, Spanish, Swedish, and Uyghur. The book was adapted into a short film in Rwanda, and published in Chile as Lenguas de obsidiana in late 2019.

In 2013 Shook founded nonprofit publishing house Phoneme Media, which has since published over thirty books translated from twenty-six different languages, including the first ever literary translations from languages like Lingala and Uyghur. Shook has translated over fourteen books from Spanish and Isthmus Zapotec, including work by Mario Bellatin, Tedi López Mills, and Víctor Terán. Their most recent translation, Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Room in Rome, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Shook served as Translator in Residence for the Poetry Parnassus in 2012, part of London’s Cultural Olympiad, featuring a poet from every participating olympic nation, where they premiered their covertly filmed short documentary Kilómetro Cero, about persecuted Equatorial Guinean poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang.

A graduate of the University of Oklahoma and the University of Oxford, Shook has performed their poetry in dozens of countries, from the Bangla Academy in Dhaka, Bangladesh to London’s Southbank, South by Southwest to PEN Haiti in Port au Prince. Their writing has appeared in Ambit, The Believer Logger, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Review, and World Literature Today, among many other publications. They were a 2017 NEA Translation Fellow for their translation of the São Toméan poet Conceição Lima’s selected poems, and are a contributing editor to Ambit, Bengal Lights, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and serve on the advisory board of World Literature Today. Shook is currently Artist in Residence at Kashkul, an arts and research collaborative at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, a Visiting Teaching Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Writing Program, and a Fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at the University of Southern California. Read their recent writing from Iraq about young Êzîdî poets, Kurdish manuscript preservationists, and Rhojelat installation art.

A former Honorary Consul for the Republic of Burundi, Shook serves on the board of directors of Kazoza Finance, a Burundian community bank that has generated over 300,000 jobs since 2012.