About

Deborah Garfinkle is a poet, writer, critic. award-winning translator of Czech literature and experimental filmmaker based in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in journals and magazines in the US and abroad. Her doctoral dissertation, Bridging East and West: Czech Surrealism’s Interwar Experiment 1934-1938 examined the relationship between the Czech Surrealist Group’s relationship with the French Surrealists and the Soviet Avantgarde. Her first full-length translation from the Czech, Ivan Diviš’s The Old Man’s Verses, (Verše starého muže) was nominated for a Northern California Book Award in Translation. In 2013, she was awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship and a PEN/Michael Henry Heim Translation Grant for her translation, Worm-Eaten Time (Červotočivé světlo), selected poems by Pavel Šrut, written the wake of the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. The book-length translation was published by Phoneme Media in 2016. In 2022, Dr. Garfinkle was awarded a second NEA Translation Grant for her completing her translation of Sylva Fischerová’s short story collection, Thousands of Plateaus (Tisíce plošin). She also received a residency from the Czech Literary Centre to support her translation. One of the stories from the collection, “It’s the Grub, Man,” appeared in an issue of The Massachusetts Review Online. Her experimental short, Heron's Head, shot in 16 mm and edited in camera, was screened at the 2018 and 2019 City Shorts Festival. Her film, DKK. a meditation on the racist and misogynistic foundations of film technology, also shot in 16 mm and transferred to digital, was included in the first Gravitational Lensing, Feminist Films Dialogues screening in June, 2024. For Dr. Garfinkle, the bridge has served as her creative metaphor for breaking down barriers in the arts, disciplines, cultures and communities to find new ways of engaging with the life of the heart and mind.