David Shook

David Shook is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, and editor who was raised in Latin America. Their debut collection Our Obsidian Tongues was longlisted for the 2013 International Dylan Thomas Prize and adapted into a short film in Rwanda. In 2013, they founded the nonprofit publishing house Phoneme Media, which has since published more than 30 books translated from over 25 languages. They have translated numerous books from Spanish and Isthmus Zapotec, including Mario Bellatin’s The Large Glass: Three Autobiographies (2014), Víctor Terán’s The Spines of Love (2014), and Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Room in Rome, a finalist for the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. They were a 2017 NEA Translation Fellow for their translation of No Gods Live Here: The Selected Poems by São Tomé poet Conceição Lima. Shook is a Fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at the University of Southern California.