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Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

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.

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Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season

2023 PEN Award Finalist

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Recent Work

Books

Published collections of poetry and translations

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Other Work

Published poems, essays, and translations

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Corporate

Descriptions of selected consulting engagements

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The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz, 30th Anniversary Edition, Monkfish Publishing (forthcoming, December 2024)

In 1995 The Green Sea of Heaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz, Ms. Gray’s translations of Hafiz, was published by White Cloud Press. In the years since the translations have been favorably reviewed in both academic and literary circles. Working in collaboration with Iraj Anvar, a scholar and translator of Persian classical poetry, this 30th Anniversary edition includes an additional thirty ghazals not included in the original edition, and offers the Persian text en face for each ghazal. It includes updated and revised introductory material and notes, as well as the full text of Daryush Shayegan’s essay “The Visionary Topography of Hafiz.”

Available December 2024.

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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.”

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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.”

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