Jason Sommer is drawn to doing literary work that bridges cultures. In addition to co-translations of Bathing Women by Tie Ning and Wang in Love and Bondage: Four Novellas by Wang Xiaobo, Sommer has published English versions of Irish language verse. These have appeared in the bilingual collections The Oomph of Quicksilver and Selected Poems 1968-1984, by Michael Davitt, and A Portrait of the Artist as an Abominable Snowman by Gabriel Rosenstock, as well as in Jumping off Shadow: Twenty-Four Contemporary Irish Poets edited by Greg Delanty and An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, edited by Wes Davis. He translated for and co-edited a special English supplement for the Irish language poetry magazine, Innti.

Sommer’s latest publication is the memoir Shmuel’s Bridge: Following the Tracks to Auschwitz With My Survivor Father. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Portulans in the University of Chicago’s Phoenix Poets Series. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, he has won a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award and has been honoured with fellowships at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences.