Genesee Reading Series: Leah Zazulyer and Kyle Semmel

Leah Zazulyer and Kyle Semmel The Genesee Reading Series is a smorgasbord for your literary palate. Come every month on the second Tuesday, and by the end of the year you will have feasted on the work of 24 regional authors (some prominent, some emerging; writers of fiction, poetry, essay, creative nonfiction, memoir). It’s up close and personal in the intimate performance space upstairs— stay afterward and talk to the authors while eating cookies.

Leah Zazulyer writers poetry and prose, translates Yiddish poetry, and is a retired special education teacher, consultant, school psychologist, and mediator. Originally schooled in comparative literature, she has long been interested in issues of language as it relates to culture, in “the geography of the imagination”, and the “narrative of self”. She lives in Rochester, New York, but grew up in a bilingual family in California that emigrated from Belarus. She has studied Yiddish as an adult privately in Rochester, and in summer programs at Oxford and Columbia Universities.

She has received grants from the Constance Saltonstall Arts Foundation, The New York State Council on the Arts, The New York State Foundation On The Arts, and the Winston Translation Award from the Yiddish Book Center. Prior books of her own poetry have included The World Is A Wedding, Round Trip Year, Songs the Zazulyer Sang, and Alone As a Stone. She has also translated two bilingual books of Yiddish poetry by Israel Emiot: Siberia and As Long As We Are Not Alone.

K. E. Semmel is a writer and translator of Norwegian and Danish literature. His book-length translations include work by Karin Fossum, Jussi Adler-Olsen, Simon Fruelund,