Conor Bracken is a poet, translator, and educator. His chapbook, Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour, was selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the fifth annual Frost Place Chapbook Competition (Bull City Press, 2017), and his debut collection of poems, The Enemy of My Enemy is Me, winner the 2020 Diode Editions Book Prize, was published in 2021.
His translation work focuses on francophone poetry. Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019), his translation of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s first full-length collection of poems, was the first English translation of the avant-garde Moroccan writer’s work. Another translation—of Jean D’Amérique’s No Way in the Skin without this Bloody Embrace—was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2022 and is D’Amérique’s first appearance in English. It was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
His work has earned him fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, The Frost Place, Inprint, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and can be found in places like BOMB, New England Review, the New Yorker, Ploughshares, and West Branch. He lives in Ohio, teaches classes with LitCleveland, and teaches in the Liberal Arts department at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
books: Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour, winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition
photo credit: Colette Kulig