Elianna Kan – Literary Publishing World in NY City

Elianna has spent the last two years living, working and seeking fresh air in New York City. After an internship at The Paris Review, she worked for Picador, a commercial literary publishing house. In October of 2012, she was given the opportunity to come on board as Senior Editor of a brand new literary magazine in print and online called The American Reader. After 6 months of barely juggling both jobs, she decided to leave the publishing house in order to pursue a freelance career for a little while—opening herself up to the possibility of taking on a wide variety of projects including (but not at all limited to): proofreading the Spanish manuscript of Bolaño’s complete poetic works, acquiring/editing literature in translation for The American Reader, writing (when time permits), and helping to create an evening at the New York Public Library to celebrate the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and his book Poet in New York.PEN photo

Her mantra these days courtesy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:

“I beg you…to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer…take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don’t hate anything.”