Lawrence Schimel is an author, anthologist, and translator working in poetry, fiction, essays, graphic novels, and children’s books. He also runs the independent poetry press A Midsummer Night’s Press.
His writings have been translated into more than 50 languages, including Icelandic, Maltese, Farsi, Kurdish, Basque, Luxembourgish, Changana, Romansch, and Japanese.
He has won the Lambda Literary Award twice and has been a finalist 13 other times in numerous categories. In addition to his writing, he is a prolific literary translator, into English and Spanish. He has translated over 160 books in many different genres by writers such as George Takei, Danez Smith, Trifonia Melibea Obono, and Maggie Nelson. He served two terms as the co-chair of the Publishing Triangle and co-programmed the OutWrite queer literary conference in the 90s.
He as given lectures, talks, and workshops at many conferences, including Bread Loaf, the Melbourne Writers Festival, and at universities including Princeton, Yale, Amherst, Duke, Wayne State, Rutgers and the University of Cádiz.
The Beard Paradox
In its fifth printing in Spain, the bestselling Spanish-language collection of homoerotic microfiction by Lawrence Schimel A Beard Paradox has also been published in Slovenian translation. Select stories from the book have been published in Sandra Kingery’s English translation in periodicals such as Words Without Borders, Barcelona Review, Hawai’i Review, and Río Grande Review, as well as numerous anthologies.
Finally, the entire volume is available to English readers for the first time.
“Schimel’s eroticism infuses a whole life, from mechanical fucking, to the night air, to a tan line. The stories conjure a world in a sentence. If Hemingway wrote erotica. Personal and sublime.” – Susie Bright
Recent Translation
Music for Bamboo Strings/Música para cuerdas de bambú
Intimate conversations, soliloquies, patches of burned diaries, existential definitions of beauty, pain, or personal discovery come together in Music for Bamboo Strings.
A subtle tapestry of music imbues the story and cinematography of each poem. This bilingual collection by Cuban-American poet Carlos Pintado has been masterfully translated by Lawrence Schimel, a recipient of the 2023 Sundial Literary Translation Award.
Música para cuerdas de bambú/ Music for Bamboo Strings is a lyric journey through several cultures and themes: a reinterpretation of Kawabata’s Snow Country or Vincent van Gogh’s Wheatfields with Crows, for instance. These poems also evoke Pintado’s quieter moments, while he’s subdued by flickering flames in the small hours or captivated by a fleeting face in a crowd.
Music for Bamboo Strings is a territory of fear and beauty that wonders what may be revealed through poetry and plots an emotional cartography of paths that might be followed.