I'm Cutter Streeby—a writer, translator, and interdisciplinary artist working across poetry, translation theory, intersemiotics, and video. This site is my studio notebook: a place to publish experiments, share works-in-progress, and trace the threads between language, image, and sound.
My core obsession is translation as a creative engine—not just the movement of meaning between languages, but the transposition of experience across forms: poem into film, text into image, voice into sequence, silence into structure. I'm drawn to the moment where fidelity breaks open into invention—where a "version" becomes its own work, and the gap between source and result starts to glow.
Most of what I make is made with people. I care about co-authorship, exchange, revision, and the slow trust that lets a project evolve past anyone's first idea. Collaboration, for me, isn't a production tactic—it's an ethics: an attention to listening, to consent, to shared risk, to building something neither person could've made alone.
Poems (finished and unfinished, solitary and collaborative)
Translations + notes on process, constraints, and theory
Intersemiotic work: adaptations, transpositions, hybrid forms
Video pieces and poem-films
Occasional essays on craft, attention, and how meaning survives transformation
Outside this site's focus, I work in growth and strategy at a level where results are not theoretical. I've taken companies from $4M to $100M in under ten months, multiple times, and managed over $400M in ad spend in the last five years. The work demands precision: iteration, clarity, rhythm, revision.
I run Grayling & Wraith (graylingandwraith.com), partnering with teams building real products that are ready to scale. At that level, marketing is not a department—it is structural. Product, engineering, operations, sales, and creative must operate inside the same system of truth for growth to hold.
That work and this work are not separate. Here, the focus is visibility: giving serious poetry, academic work, and fiction forms that can circulate beyond their usual constraints. Not simplifying the work, but re-registering it—so it can be seen without losing what makes it difficult or precise.
If you're interested in collaborating—translation, video, intersemiotic work, or something we have to invent—reach out. If you're building something that needs to grow, you can find me through graylingandwraith.com.
The Asian Conference on Arts and Cultures, Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok, Thailand — Streeby, Cutter. "Navigating Lese Majeste: Translating the Poetry of Zakariya Amataya." Paper presentation.
Intersemiotic Translation Conference, Institute of English Studies, University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland — Streeby, Cutter. "Defining the Parameters of Intersemiotic Translation." Paper accepted.
Reaching the World Literary Festival and Conference, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand — Streeby, Cutter. "Translation as Collaboration: Anchoring Translation in Art." Paper presentation.
English in Southeast Asia Conference, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — Streeby, Cutter. "A Poet First." Paper presentation.
The Ionian Center for the Arts and Culture, 2026 — Streeby, Cutter. Invited Guest Faculty. Poetry Videos and Artist Marketing Keynote.
Selected conference travel/funding supported by Assumption University's Academic Research Committee.
World Literature Today — "Navigating Lese Majeste: Translating Zakariya Amataya."
Modern Poetry in Translation — "The Art of Omission."
Hayden's Ferry Review — "Thailand's Che" (Zakariya Amataya), translator's note.
The White Review (UK) — "Interview," "Seaside Graffiti" (Featured Poet).
The Cincinnati Review — "Diagnosis."
Tension: Rupture (with Michael Haight). Tupelo Press.
About: his collaboration is intersemiotic in both directions. Some of Haight's paintings begin as responses to poems, while some of Streeby's poems are written through Haight's visual vignettes from Alcoholic Crepuscules—so the "source" system (paint, color, figure, scene) is carried over into a different one (line, syntax, rhythm, voice), not simply narrated or captioned.
The book also builds a feedback loop: poems don't just accompany images, and images don't merely illustrate poems. Each medium revises the other—what the painting makes legible in a poem, what the poem unsettles or intensifies in a painting—so meaning happens in the crossing, not inside either form alone.
And the ekphrastic "conversation" at stake isn't a hunt for one-to-one equivalence. It's a translation practice that keeps the mismatch visible: what pigment can do that sentences can't, what cadence can do that a frame can't—letting each new poem/painting open different perceptual, emotional, and formal constraints.
LitMag - "Amidah: Portrait of Bernice Abbott"
Anthology of South East Asian Poets (Vagabond Press) — "Lese Majeste: In the backroom," "Meaning," "With only my hands" (Zakariya Amataya), translations.
Modern Poetry in Translation — "Lese Majeste: In the backroom," "Meaning" (Zakariya Amataya), translations.
Modern Poetry in Translation — Poems by Luis Felipe Fabre ("Trailer 1," "Infomercial," "Reflection of the Unknown," "Doris Najera and Detective Ramirez"), translations.
Print Oriented Bastards — "Trailer 1" (Luis Felipe Fabre), translation.
New Orleans Review — "The Traitor."
The McNeese Review — "XXX."
The Great American Poetry Show Anthology (The Muse Media) — "American Icarus," "I Died on a Brilliant Day Like This:"
Spillway — "The Feather Woman."
Owen Wister Review (University of Wyoming) — "I Died on a Brilliant Day Like This:", "Incantation."
In Posse Review — "Night Poem," "Negative: California" (Pushcart Prize nomination for "Negative: California").
Word: Isla Vista Arts & Culture Magazine — "Marionette."
The Chaffey Review — "Desires are already memories"; "Sunset."
The Columbia Review — "Isle of Dogs."
Sugar House Review — "Act of Capes," "All Souls Cemetery, London."
Tengen Magazine (UK) — "Act of Capes," "Sunset."
Grey Sparrow Journal — "Jazz Fugue," "Pigeons."