Yuyutsu RD Sharma and Art Mantecon
Fri. January 18, 2013 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street at SPC
Host: Tim Kahl
Yuyutsu RD Sharma is a favorite among Sacramentans. He is a widely traveled Nepali /Indian writer who was born at Nakodar, Punjab, India and moved to Nepal at an early age and now writes in English and Nepali. Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world to read from his works and conducts creative writing workshop at various universities in the United States and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.
He has published nine poetry collections including, Milarepa’s Bones, Helambu:33 New Poems, (Nirala, New Delhi, 2012), Space Cake, Amsterdam, & Other Poems from Europe and America, (Howling Dog Press, Colorado, 2009), Annapurna Poems, (Nirala, New Delhi 2008), Everest Failures (White Lotus Book Shop, Kathmandu, 2008), Nepal Trilogy, Photographs and Poetry on Annapurna, Everest, Helambu & Langtang (www.Nepal-Trilogy.de, Epsilonmedia, Karlsruhe, 2010), a 900-page book with German photographer, Andreas Stimm. He has brought out a translation of Irish poet Cathal O’ Searcaigh poetry in Nepali in a bilingual collection entitled, Kathmandu: Poems, Selected and New, (2006) and a translation of Hebrew poet Ronny Someck’s poetry in Nepali in a bilingual collection, Baghdad, February 1991 & Other Poems. He has translated and edited several anthologies of contemporary Nepali poetry in English and along with Shailendra Sakar launched a literary movement, Kathyakayakalp (“content metamorphosis”), in Nepali poetry.
Yuyutsu’s own work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew,Korean Spanish and Dutch. Currently, he edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and contributes literary columns to Nepal’s leading daily, The Himalayan Times.
Art Mantecón is a longtime poet and poetry booster who is known throughout the Sacramento Valley poetry community as a man of rich talents, a sharp wit, and insistent humor.
He was born north of Mexico in Laredo, Texas and grew up south of Canada in Detroit, Michigan. He always wanted to be a writer of some sort. For a while he thought he’d be a newspaper reporter. He went to school and ended up a state worker despite better intentions.
Art Mantecón began writing poetry after Francisco Alarcón, who had never even heard him read a poem, insisted that he was a poet. He figured Francisco knew what he was talking about (and that if he didn’t know what he was talking about, it would do minimal harm) and has been writing poetry ever since.
He is the editor and translator of a collection of poems by Spanish poet Leopoldo Maria Panero entitled My Naked Brain, which was a finalist for The Northern California Book Award for translation in 2012.
