Texas Institute of Letters honors Cassells for best book translation

The Texas Institute of Letters (TIL) has named Cyrus Cassells, a professor in the Department of English and Texas State University System Regents' Professor at Texas State University, co-winner of the 2024 Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translation of a Book. 

Cassells was honored for his translation of To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu from the Catalan language, published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. This is Cassells’ second Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award, having previously won in 2019 for Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, also from Catalan. 

The TIL is a nonprofit honor society founded in 1936 to celebrate Texas literature and recognize distinctive literary achievement. The TIL’s elected membership consists of the state’s most respected writers—including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Man Booker Prize, Academy Award, International Latino Book Award, Americas Award, Lambda Literary Award, MacArthur Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Cassells served as the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas and is the author of nine books of poetry including Soul Make a Path through Shouting, The World That The Shooter Left Us, The Mud Actor, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, The Crossed-Out Swastika and The Gospel according to Wild Indigo. In 2019, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Among his other honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, a Pushcart Prize, two NEA grants and a Lambda Literary Award.