We’re so excited for Kate Hollander, who recently won the 14th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize for her collection My German Dictionary! Waywiser Press will publish the book this fall, when Kate will read alongside Charles Wright at the Shakespeare Folger Library.
Please click here to read two poems from My German Dictionary. Below, Kate took the time to share some thoughts with us about the book, which began in our poetry workshops here at BU. Kate says:
The seeds and roots of My German Dictionary go back to my time at BU, where I worked closely with Robert Pinsky and Louise Glück and with the really lovely members of my cohort. The book is a little pocket guide, maybe, to my own internal “Germany” which is related to but I suppose not identical with the real, historical thing. It is, in that way, precisely what the title says. Put another way: It’s all the things that inform what I do and write and teach as an historian but which can’t be expressed by me in my role as an historian.
I’d known for a long time that I was and wanted to be both an historian and a poet. Once I got to BU, it turned out that I could do both, in a way–I took a seminar in German romantic philosophy with Allen Speight at BU with a whole bunch of very very smart PhD students in philosophy, and it just so happened that that year the translation workshop was taught by the Germanist Will Waters. It was in that translation workshop that I met another student who recommend I work with Jim Schmidt, who eventually became my advisor in the PhD program in history. I took a German reading course with Silvia Beier, who unlocked some doors to the language for me. There are quite a few poems in the book that date from my time in the creative writing program, and more from my time in the PhD program, just a few doors down from the Creative Writing program, at BU.
Congratulations, Kate, and thank you for sharing with us! We’re happy for you and looking forward to seeing your book soon.
Katherine Hollander is a poet and historian. Her poetry, criticism, and scholarship have appeared in Literary Imagination, Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, The Brecht Yearbook, New German Critique, and elsewhere. She is presently Faculty Fellow in modern European history at Colby College and a guest reader for Sugar House Review.
