Shook Translator & Editor

Shook is a poet and translator who lives in Northern California. Their recent translations include Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi’s A Friend’s Kitchen, cotranslated from Arabic with Bryar Bajalan, Mikeas Sánchez’ How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, cotranslated from Zoque and Spanish with Wendy Call, and Conceição Lima’s No Gods Live Here, translated from Portuguese. Shook’s film A Barcode Scanner, based on Zêdan Xelef’s poem by the same name, won the 2020 Best Film for Tolerance Prize at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.

Zêdan Xelef was born on Shingal Mountain in northern Iraq, in 1995. Displaced from his home by Daesh’s attempt to exterminate the Yezidi, he arrived with his family to the Chamishko IDP camp in late 2014. He studied translation at the University of Duhok, and his current projects include translating Whitman’s Song of Myself into Kurmanji and a selection of poets from Rojava into English. His poems and translations have appeared on Harriet (Poetry Foundation) and Words Without Borders, as well as in Asymptote, Epiphany, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Plume, Poetry London, Tripwire, and World Literature Today. Today he is an MFA student at San Francisco State University, and contributes to ingal Lives, an oral history project based at Kashkul, the center for arts and culture at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, where he manages a team of Yezidi young people dedicated to collecting and preserving their culture’s endangered oral tradition.