So the Day Begins: Grief Refrain

Anja Utler is a German poet whose most recent work is Es beginnt: Trauerrefrain (So the Day Begins: Grief Refrain). She is one of the most significant contemporary German poets; her writing has been recognized with many awards, most recently the Peter Huchel Prize (2024). Her work includes multiple volumes of poetry, translations and essays.

Kurt Beals is Visiting Associate Professor of German and Humanities Fellow in Literary Translation at the University of Richmond. Most recently, he has translated Jenny Erpenbeck’s Things That Disappear and re-translated Hermann Hesse’s The Steppenwolf and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.

Aimee Chor is a poet and translator in Seattle. She studied at the University of Chicago and the universities of Tübingen and Munich, and has received DAAD, Mellon, and Fulbright fellowships. Her translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Circumference, The Opposite of Seduction: New German Poetry (2025), and elsewhere.