Whose Voice Is It Anyway: The Translation Panel with Leonarda Carranza, Morteza Deghani, and Katia Grubisic. Moderated by Lamees Al Ethari.

Leonarda Carranza is a Central American born writer who now calls Brampton home. She holds a PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education where her research examined humiliation and shaming practices in the classroom. In her writing, she draws on experiences of migration, loss and unbelonging. Her writing has been published in Room, The New Quarterly, Briarpatch magazine and Best Canadian Essays 2017. Her essay “Tongues” is part of Room Magazine’s first women of colour edition. She is the winner of Briarpatch magazine’s seventh annual Writing in the Margins contest for her piece, “The McGill Experiments.”

Morteza Dehghani is a poet and literary translator who writes in English and Persian. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Send My Roots Rain, in English (published by North Waterloo Press, 2013) and The Whale Who Breaks the Surface of Morning in Persian (published in Iran by the Maya Press, 2016). He is a four-time winner of the Creative Writing Award at the University of Waterloo where he is just about to defend a PhD on elegy and the intersection of this poetic form with essayistic elegiac films. He is also currently translating a selection of poems by the American poet Robert Hass.

Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor, and translator. She has taught at Bishop’s University and at Concordia University, in CEGEPS, and for the Quebec Writers’ Federation. She has been editor-in-chief at Arc magazine, was a founding editor of the Icehouse Poetry imprint, and is currently associate editor with Linda Leith Publishing. Her work has appeared in various Canadian and international publications. She has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and her collection of poems What if red ran out won the Gerald Lampert award for best first book. Photo by J. Parr.

Lamees Al Ethari is an Iraqi-Canadian writer and artist. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Waterloo, where she has been teaching academic and creative writing since 2015. Her poetry has been published in The Malpais Review and the anthology Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here and printed as broadsides. She has a forthcoming work in poetry, From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris (Fall 2018), and another in prose titled Waiting for the Rain: A Memoir (Spring 2019). She is currently working on her monograph, Resistance and Memory in Iraqi Women’s Life Narratives.