Acclaimed Mexican-American writer, translator, and editor Chloe García Roberts will visit Illinois State University on October 24 to celebrate and discuss her new book Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology (co•im•press, 2024). She will take part in PubUnit Presents, a two-part event series centered on embracing the interdisciplinary English studies model of the Department of English by bringing in writers who are also editors, and who often embody additional literary and educational roles. This event series is hosted by the Publications Unit in the Department of English.
Both of the PubUnit Presents events are Thursday, October 24, at University Galleries. At 11 a.m., García Roberts will be in conversation with Dr. Steve Halle, director of the Publications Unit, about her roles as a writer, translator, and deputy editor of Harvard Review. There will be a question-and-answer period afterward.
The second part of the event is at 5 p.m. and will be a reading from Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology. The reading will be followed by a question-and-answer session and book signing. Fire Eater will be available for purchase from the publisher in mid-October with options for pick-up at the event. Both events are free and open to the public.
“Like a Nuestra Señora Desatanudos—Our Lady of Untying Knots— Chloe García Roberts loosens the tangles and snarls of origin, trauma, motherhood, and language itself in these stunningly poetic and philosophical essays to reveal the “glinting line of love” that can pull us back into the fold of belonging when we feel most alone, blown violently by circumstance into the deep, cold ocean of our existence.”
—Rosa Alcalá, author of YOU
About the Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology
Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology by Chloe García Roberts presents an astonishing collection of poem-essays that seek to reveal firm footholds and guiding threads to lead readers—and the author herself—through the treacherous and often ill-lit forests of liminality. In essays covering language worship, translation as sacrament, the allusion of memory, and more, García Roberts creates a cumulative argument across 10 works of intensifying emotional registers: Language is not only a medium for communicating knowledge but is itself a font of understanding. Churning with boundless heart, thought, and wild desire to plumb the depths of self and spirit in search of geneses, these essays develop their form through the interplay of memory, etymology, religion, and translation. Collectively, Fire Eater offers a beacon for spiritual seekers and linguaphiles alike: a divination with the dictionary that is at once an invocation to unravel the complex knots of our in betweenness and an antidote to our despair.
About the Author
Chloe García Roberts is a Mexican-American translator and poet. She serves as deputy editor of Harvard Review and as a lecturer of poetry at MIT. She translates from Spanish and Chinese, which includes Tang poet Li Shangyin. Her translation of Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes (New Directions) was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She has also translated collected poems by Li Shangyin which was published in the New York Review Books/Poets series.
In 2021, she was the recipient of an NEA fellowship in translation for her translation of the novel Carne de Dios by Mexican author Homero Aridjis (forthcoming from University of Arizona Press in 2025). Additionally, she has translated numerous children’s literature such as True Story of a Mouse Who Never Asked for It by Ana Christina Herreros which was named a Best Children’s Book of 2021 by the New York Times, and Cao Wenxuan’s Feather (Archipelago). Her first book, The Reveal, is a book of poetry published as part of Noemi Press’s Akrilika Series for innovative Latino writing. Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology (co•im•press, 2024) is her second book.
The event is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation; the Illinois State University Foundation Fund; the College of Arts and Sciences; and the Publications Unit in the Department of English.
For additional information, contact Holms Troelstrup, assistant director of the Publications Unit, at jhtroel@IllinoisState.edu or (309) 438-3025. Follow the Publications Unit on X @PubUnit_ISU and on Instagram @PubUnit.
