Layla Benitez-James
Photo by Reggie James
Bio
Layla Benitez-James is the author of God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode but He Had to Make Sure (Jai-Alai Books, 2018), selected by Major Jackson for Cave Canem’s Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Benitez-James has served as the director of literary outreach for the Unamuno Author Series in Madrid and edited its poetry festival anthology, Desperate Literature. Poems, translations, and essays are published in Black Femme Collective, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latino Book Review, Poetry London, Acentos Review, Hinchas de Poesia, Waxwing, and Asymptote Journal Podcast. Reviews of contemporary poetry can be found at Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books. This project will be completed in collaboration with Lawrence Schimel whose translations from the Spanish have won a PEN Translates Award from English PEN (twice), the Cliff Becker Book Translation Award, and been finalists for the Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Eisner Award, among other honors.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Spanish of Daughter of the Road by Spanish author, reporter, and film director Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio. Her first novel, Daughter of the Road, explores Afro-European identity and follows a young woman moving between countries and cultures. It will be the first novel by a Black woman writer from Spain to be translated into English. This project will be a collaboration with translator Lawrence Schimel.
Support from the National Endowment for the Arts crystalizes my career as a translator, allowing me to devote time and attention to further creative and linguistic growth. From a creative writing class taught in Spanish by Óscar Curieses in Madrid in 2009 to a graduate translation workshop at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program where I got my MFA in poetry, translation and the Spanish language have been integral to my writing life and inspired a move to Spain in 2014. Translation is what saves me when I am at a loss for my own words, and literature in translation has cracked opened my world far more than I could ever travel.
In addition to appreciating Hija del camino’s literary qualities, I’m excited to work with Lawrence Schimel whose award-winning translation of the novel La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono was the first book by a woman writer from Equatorial Guinea to be published in translation in English. Lawrence has devoted his time and mentorship without outside support over the past year to help me build my translation career, and the NEA’s funding of our project breathes fresh life and excitement into our partnership. This grant will allow us the necessary time and space to complete the novel, as well as making it possible for us to travel and work on the novel in person and in collaboration with Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio.
I often work inspired by poet and translator Aaron Coleman’s idea that literary translation is a tool to make more vivid the relationships between afro descendent people in the Americas and around the world, and Hija del camino is a captivating and crucial piece of this tapestry. It’s an honor to have our work acknowledged as part of the extraordinary tradition of NEA writers and translators.