Join us for a virtual author talk with Margo Rejmer, winner of Poland's Polityka Passport Award and Kościelski Award for her oral history Mud Sweeter than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania. Margo will be in conversation with Albanian American poet and translator Ani Gjika, who won the 2021 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for her forthcoming memoir, By its Right Name.

Małgorzata (Margo) Rejmer, born in 1985 in Warsaw, is an award-winning Polish novelist, reporter, and writer of short stories. Her books, which have been translated into eight languages, include the novel Toximia (2009) and two works of nonfiction: Bucharest: Dust and Blood (2013), which won the Newsweek Award for best book of 2014, the Gryfia Literary Award, and the TVP Kultura Award, and Mud Sweeter than Honey (2018), for which she was was awarded the Polityka Passport, the most prestigious prize in Poland for emerging artists, as well as the Arkady Fiedler Award. She holds the title of the Young Ambassador of the Polish Language. She lives in Warsaw and Tirana.

Albanian-born writer, Ani Gjika is the author and literary translator of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, among them Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her translation from the Albanian of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Negative Space (New Directions and Bloodaxe Books, 2018) won an English PEN Award and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, PEN America Award, and Best Translated Book Award. She is a graduate of Boston University’s MFA program where she was a 2011 Robert Pinsky Global fellow, and GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program where she was a 2019 Pauline Scheer Fellow. Gjika currently teaches English as a Second Language at Framingham High School in Massachusetts.