Hellenist and translator Therese Sellers will read excerpts from her unpublished translation of AEOLIC LAND by Ilias Venezis, an account of the author’s childhood in Asia Minor before World War 1. She will select passages where the author personifies nature to amplify the mythic quality of the lost world he evokes, and to elevate the experiences of his characters to a universal plane. Written twenty years after the Asia Minor Catastrophe, AEOLIC LAND is both a meditation on the loss of homeland and an attempt to redeem that loss through literature.

Therese Sellers is the author of Alpha is for Anthropos, a collection of nursery rhymes in Ancient Greek that she composed to teach Greek to children. She studied Classical Greek at Harvard, where she also began her study of Modern Greek. From 1987-1990, Sellers lived in Greece and studied the life and work of the American philhellene, Eva Palmer Sikelianos. She returned to Boston for graduate school and received a Ph.D. in Modern Greek literature from Boston University in 2001. Her thesis was a translation of AIOLIKI YI by Ilias Venezis. After fifteen years teaching Latin and Greek to school-aged children, Sellers is returning to her translation of Venezis’ masterpiece to prepare it for publication.