• Age: 18
• Grade: 12

Born to a French-Canadian mother and Algerian father, Ouanessa Younsi is a bold and unique voice in modern Francophone poetry. In this intensely personal recitation on identity and ethnicity, Younsi takes the reader on a surreal odyssey through a liminal world of belonging and unbelonging, absence and presence, mind and body. Her visionary work, first published in French and translated here by Rebecca Thompson, is unsettling, riveting and guaranteed to leave readers contemplating the existential mysteries of “self.”

Ouanessa Younsi is a poet, psychiatrist, and lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal. She is the author of three books of poetry in French, Prendre langue (2011), Emprunter aux oiseaux (2014), Soigner, aimer (2016), and Métissée (2018).

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Rebecca L. Thompson holds a PhD in literature, with a focus on translation studies and works as an adjunct professor at State University of New York at Fredonia. Her translation work has appeared in Metamorphoses and Modern Poetry in Translation.

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