Claudia Serea

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-born poet who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have been published widely in journals and anthologies such as Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Gravel, The Malahat Review, The Puritan, Brooklyn Rail/InTranslation, Asymptote, carte blanche, Going Down Swinging, Oxford Poetry, The Lake, Ambit, Banshee Lit, among others. Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Farsi, and Arabic, and have been featured in The Writer’s Almanac.

Serea’s poem My Father’s Quiets Friends in Prison, 1958-1962 received the New Letters Readers Award in 2013. She also has won the 2014 Award for Poetry Performance, Levure Littéraire (France), several honorable mentions and short lists for individual poems and chapbooks, 9 Pushcart Prize nominations and 5 nominations for Best of the Net.

Serea’s most recent published book is Twoxism (8th House Publishing, Montreal, Canada, 2018), a poetry-photography collaboration with visual artist Maria Haro. In 2021, her poems traslated into Arabic by Akram Alkatreb were published in the collection titled Tonight I'll Become a Lake Into Which You'll Sink, featured at the 2021 International Book Fair in Cairo, Egypt. Serea's 6th poetry collection Writing on the Walls at Night is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in early 2022.

Serea’s other full-length poetry collections include Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, Canada, 2012), A Dirt Road Hangs from the Sky (8th House Publishing, Canada, 2013), To Part Is to Die a Little (Cervená Barva Press, 2015) and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, 2016). She also has published the chapbooks The Russian Hat (White Knuckles Press, 2014), The System (Cold Hub Press, New Zealand, 2012), With the Strike of a Match (White Knuckles Press, 2011), and Eternity’s Orthography (Finishing Line Press, 2007).

Together with Paul Doru Mugur and Adam J. Sorkin, Serea co-edited and co-translated The Vanishing Point That Whistles, an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House Publishing, 2011). She also translated from the Romanian Adina Dabija’s Beautybeast (Northshore Press, Alaska, 2012). In 2012, Serea co-founded and she currently edits National Translation Month.

Serea’s poem In Those years, No One Slept was set to music for choir by composer Richard Campbell and the piece won the top prize at The Uncommon Music Festival Competition in Sitka, AK, in August 2018. Since then, the piece was performed by choirs in several states, most notably at an event at the Pullo Center in York, PA, commemorating 100 years since the end of WWI.

In 2015, Claudia Serea was featured in the documentary Poetry of Witness alongside Carolyn Forché, Bruce Weigl, Duncan Wu, and others. The Economist featured an interview with Claudia Serea on its culture blog Prospero. Serea was short-listed for the 2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical poem, The Dictionary, and, in 2014, the poems from the sequence My Father’s Quiet Friends in Prison, 1958-1962 were featured in several short videos presented at international movie festivals.

​Claudia Serea belongs to the poetry group The Red Wheelbarrow Poets and is one of the curators of the Williams Poetry Readings at the Williams Center in Rutherford, New Jersey. She works as a copywriter and writes, translates, and edits on her daily commute between New Jersey and New York.