Call for Event Proposals: Bay Area, CA

The Center for the Art of Translation presents over 50 public programs each year in the Bay Area and beyond that celebrate literary translation and global voices. We’re looking for event proposals that engage with literary translation, broadly defined, and create opportunities for community conversations

What to Send Us

We’re open to a wide range of formats—author and translator conversations, panel discussions, performances, film screenings, theater, creative workshops, listening parties, launch events, poetry readings, and collaborative artistic projects—especially events that expand the idea of translation in unexpected ways through performance, sound, film, visual art, and other creative forms. We love programs that span multiple genres; center collaboration among translators, writers, and artists; and highlight the Bay Area’s multilingual communities.

Recent events we’ve loved to program include Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets, where co-translators met in person for the first time while engaging the local Afghan community; Unbound Translations, a listening party in collaboration with Cuentero Productions and Litquake, exploring translation through sound and performance; and The Thorn Puller with Hiromi Itō and Jeffrey Angles, combining poetry, fiction, and live translation.

We’re not interested in strictly academic presentations (papers, conference talks, thesis defenses) or events promoting English-only agendas or AI translation.

Event Details and What CAT Provides

We need at least three months’ lead time to program an event. Our typical in-person events in the Bay Area have an audience of 20–50 attendees, though we occasionally program events with 100+ attendees at larger venues. We work with indie bookstores, literary venues, and other arts and culture spaces in the Bay Area. If you already have a partner venue in mind, let us know! Otherwise, we’ll help connect events to partners we think will work best.

We provide a modest honorarium for all participants and are often able to cover travel and lodging for out-of-town participants. We also promote all events on our website, social, and other channels.