Jim Kates

Background

Kates grew up in Elmsford and White Plains, New New York

Education

He attended Hackley School in Tarrytown and graduated from White Plains High School in 1963.

Career

Since 1997, with Leora Zeitlin, he has co-directed Zephyr Press, a non-profit literary publishing house that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. He was the president of the American Literary Translators Association.

He volunteered for the Mississippi Summer project after his freshman year at Wesleyan University in 1964, helping to implement a special court order encouraging voter registration in Panola County.

In the fall of 1964, he organized a Friends of the SNCC/COFO in Paris, France, to support the work of the American civil-rights movement. He returned to America in 1965 to work in Natchez, Mississippi.

He later became a public school teacher, a non-violence trainer for interpersonal and political movements, and a poet and literary translator. They have two children, Stanislav (1986) and Paula (1994).

Achievements

• 1984 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry 1995 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Project Fellowship.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Mappemonde

    (Oyster River Pr; First Edition edition (December 2001) by...)