Julia Gjika is an Albanian poet and essayist living and writing in the United States since 1996. She belongs to the first generation of Albanian women poets, having published her first book Ditëlindje (Birthday) in 1971, followed by Ku Gjej Poezinë (Where I Find Poetry) in 1978. Gjika is the author of two other collections of poetry from which these translations are taken: Muzg, 2007 (Dusk) and Ëndrra e Kthimit, 2010 (The Dream of Returning). Her poetry is characterized by an intensely moving and discerning examination of the immigrant experience. Her work is widely published in Albanian magazines, has been translated into Romanian and Polish, and has appeared in English in Two Lines Online, Gobshite Quarterly, 236 Magazine, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art and elsewhere.

"Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born writer, literary translator, educator, and author of eight books and chapbooks of poetry. Her translation of Negative Space (New Directions, 2018) was a PEN Award finalist and shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. She is an English PEN winner, NEA fellow, Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, and Pauline Scheer fellow at GrubStreet."

"Memories Pretend to Sleep wrestles with making a life and a home in both a place and a language ... Julia Gjika’s poems are crystalline, fierce, in moments melancholy and indicting, in moments questioning and longing ... Always, in each one, pulses a smoldering sense of aliveness." -- Nina Maclaughlin, The Boston Globe

"Julia Gjika turns her poems into small pocket mirrors, where time and again each person, particularly women, sees their own expansive world with all its natural cracks, together with the blossomings of love and family." -- Petraq Risto, Poet

"Julia Gjika’s poetry is lyrical, meditative, and characterized by free verse in which thought and feeling alternate as quick jolts to create rhythm. Gjika has remained the poet of vulnerability whose range of emotions well up beneath the surface of self-control and break through with concise and deft expression." -- Klara Kodra, Poet and Literary Critic

"It is nearly impossible to find in the Albanian reality a voice like Julia Gjika’s where the inflight turbulence of freedom is so complete and expansive, where a female writer speaks out of the many quotidian pains which constitute a real battlefield. Gjika’s poetical coordinates are frequently addressed, but never specific because she is a poet always in transit. Reading her is a way of setting out on an endless journey through years, various continents, cities and small Albanian towns, different times of day. Through her poetry of witness, she awakens us from ourselves, by way of ourselves." -- Natasha Lako, poet and novelist