Bio

Michael Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and translator. He's the author of five collections of poetry, including The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021) and the forthcoming The Morphologist (Milkweed, 2026)—as well as a verse translation of the creation epic of the Maya, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018), named by The New York Times as one of the best poetry books of 2018. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Granta, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, The Nation, and The Sun. He lives in Minneapolis, where he is a longtime faculty member at The Blake School.

Project Description

To support the translation of a selection of poetry by Humberto Ak'abal, a K'iche' Maya poet from Guatemala from the K'iche' and Spanish languages. Ak'abal (1952-2019) was born in Momostenango, in the western highlands of Guatemala. His formal education ended at age 12, when he began working as a shepherd and weaver and later a street vendor and porter in Guatemala City. He then moved back to Momostenango to focus solely on writing poetry, and won multiple awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. He primarily wrote first in K'iche' and translated his work into Spanish to reach a larger audience. His poems are compact, insightful, and deeply connected to a natural world that often comes to life—stones speak, leaves sing, and wooden benches remember being trees. This selected work will draw poems from three seminal books from Ak'abal's career, none of which have been previously translated.