Karen Kovacik is a poet and translator of contemporary Polish poetry. Her books include Portable City, Metropolis Burning, and Beyond the Velvet Curtain, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Her translation of Agnieszka Kuciak’s Distant Lands: An Anthology of Poets Who Don’t Exist,  longlisted for the 2014 National Translation Award, is available from White Pine Press, and in 2016, White Pine published Scattering the Dark: An Anthology of Polish Women Poets, edited and selected by her. Her translation of Jacek Dehnel’s Aperture was a runner-up for the 2019 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and she was one of three translators of Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline, a finalist for the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize. She’s Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University Indianapolis. Her work has been honored with the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum, a Fulbright Research Grant to Poland, and two Fellowships in Literary Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts.