Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet, essayist, and translator of classical and contemporary Persian literature. She is also an expert in complex negotiation, and in the formation and management of strategic relationships and other forms of inter- and intra-organizational decision-making.
Recent Work
Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems of Forough Farrokhzad available from New Directions
In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as iconic and influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a pioneer of modernist Iranian literature and as a leading figure of contemporary world literature. Farrokhzad, as translator Elizabeth Gray writes in the preface, “remains a beacon to artists, especially women and marginalized artists, who seek freedom in all its forms.”
Salient available now from
New Directions
In the foreword to her book-length poem Salient, Elizabeth Gray writes, “This work began by juxtaposing two obsessions of mine that took root in the late 1960s: the Battle of Passchendaele, fought by the British Army in Flanders in late 1917, and the chöd ritual, the core ‘severance’ practice of a lineage founded by Machik Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.”
