Reading in Translation

Jacob Abell is a Lecturer of French at Baylor University. His forthcoming book with Medieval Institute Publication is entitled Spiritual and Material Boundaries: Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise in Medieval French Verse. He has published articles on trauma in Dante and Aimé Césaire, the use of Haitian drama in the French language classroom, and Rwandan theater.

Gwen Ackerman is a long-time journalist, short-story writer and author of Goddess of Battle.

Hannah Allen is a senior at Oberlin College & Conservatory of Music, where she is pursuing degrees in Harp Performance and French, in addition to a concentration in Literary Translation. She is a former recipient of the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones des États-Unis Bourse Marandon and was selected to participate in the 2021 Banff International Literary Translation Centre.

Kalau Almony is a translator, writer, and teacher based in Tokyo, Japan. He received his Masters in Japanese Literature from the University of Hawaii Mānoa and his Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature from Brown University. His translations include the works of Nao-cola Yamazaki and Fuminori Nakamura.

Greta Alonso is the pseudonym of an author who was born in the 1980s in the Cantabria region of Spain. She works in jobs related to her training in engineering, an activity that she has pursued in different fields and companies. She has written stories, short novels, and nonfiction. She currently lives in northern Spain and combines her professional work with her love of movies, writing, and sports. El cielo de tus días (Planeta, 2020) is her first full-length novel.

Amanda Al-Raba’a holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UNC Chapel Hill. She works on gender, war, and translation in modern Middle Eastern, North African, and Arab diaspora literatures in Arabic, English, and French.

Alex Andriesse studied English literature at Boston College, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on the poetry of Robert Lowell. His translations from the French include Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1768–1800 (NYRB Classics) and Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy (forthcoming from NYRB). His translations from the Italian include Roberto Bazlen’s Notes Without a Text (Dalkey Archive Press) as well as essays by Roberto Calasso, Italo Calvino, and Pietro Citati. He is also the editor of two volumes of Best European Fiction and The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (forthcoming from NYRB). He lives in the Netherlands.

Izidora Angel is a Bulgarian-born writer and translator based in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Chicago Reader, Project Plume, and others; she has been profiled in Electric Literature, Chicago Tribune, and Asymptote Journal. Izidora’s debut novel in translation, Hristo Karastoyanov’s The Same Night Awaits Us All (Open Letter, 2018), was an English PEN grant recipient. Her second full-length translation, Nataliya Deleva’s Four Minutes, is forthcoming from Open Letter in August 2021. Izidora is currently translating Yordanka Beleva’s short story collection, Keder, and is also a founding member of the Third Coast Translators Collective.

Arielle Avraham is a writer, translator, and non-profit professional. She has translated poems by the Israeli poet Ronit Bachar Shachar. She lives in Jerusalem, Israel with her husband and two children.

Neal Baker lives in Austin, Texas and translates from French. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2020 with a major in Comparative Literature and French, and a concentration in literary translation with a focus on comics and film.

Leah Barber is a writer from Chicago. A recent graduate of Oberlin College, she lives and works in Port Townsend, Washington. She translates from German.

James Bilhartz is a student of Comparative and Japanese Literature at Oberlin College, the Editor-in-Chief of The Plum Creek Review literary and arts magazine, and an emerging translator from Japanese. His interests include comparative analysis of Japanese and American postmodern and contemporary literature, transgression in literature, and aesthetics of late capitalism.

Molly T. Blasing is Assistant Professor of Russian Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Kentucky. Blasing specializes in 20th and 21st century Russian literature and culture. Her research has been published in Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, The Theatre Times and A Companion to Marina Cvetaeva. Her translations of contemporary Russian poetry and drama have appeared in Yellow Edenwald Field, Ulbandus Review and Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader. She is currently at work on the first English language translation of the memoirs of writer Anastasiia Tsvetaeva (1894-1993), the sister of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva.   

Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor and literary translator. She won the 2018 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian literature for her translation-in-progress of Mariateresa Di Lascia’s Passaggio in Ombra. Her literary translations have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Asymptote Journal, Drunken Boat, and Trafika Europe. Her personal essays have been published by The New York Times, Catapult, Longreads, Brevity and CNN Travel. She has written about contemporary Italian literature for Literary Hub, Ploughshares, World Literature Today, Three Percent and the Kenyon Review. She studied Italian literature at Wesleyan University and has an MFA in Writing from Bennington College and an M.A. in Italian Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Connecticut. She will be a short-term fellow at the New York Public Library, working on translations of Holocaust-era literature.

Elena Borelli received her Ph.D in Italian Literature from Rutgers University, USA. She has published numerous articles on Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio and the literature of the Italian fin de siècle. Between 2012 and 2016 she was Assistant Professor of Italian literature at the City University of New York. Her research focuses on the notion and discourse of desire in the culture of late-nineteenth century Italy. She has published two books, The Fire Within, an edited collection of essays on the theme of desire in Italian literature, and Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Ethics of Desire: Between Action and Contemplation. Elena is currently involved in several translation projects, namely the full English translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s Poemi Conviviali, in collaboration with poet James Ackhurst, and of Pascoli’s Canti di Castelvecchio with poet Stephen Campiglio. She regularly contributes to Journal of Italian Translation with translations of contemporary Italian and Anglophone poets. Currently she is Deputy Team Leader for Italian, Classical Languages and Linguistics at the Modern Language Centre of King’s College London, UK.

Melanie Broder is a writer in New York and elsewhere. She’s currently at work on a novel and translating a poetry collection from Spanish. She has recently been published in The Common. You can find her on Twitter @melbroder or at melaniebroder.com.

Alex Brostoff is a writer, teacher, and Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer Magazine, Hyperallergic, Hypocrite Reader, and ASAP/Journal.

Jenny Buckland is a Spanish into English translator who has recently graduated with an MA in Applied Translation Studies from the University of Leeds. She currently works in an independent bookshop in London, taking on freelance translation projects on the side. She is working on an anthology of prose poetry by Eduardo Moga after initially translating some of his work for International Writers at Leeds. Follow her at @jennybcklnd91

Roberto Carretta is an Italian writer, translator, and philosopher of art from Turin.

Richard Carvalho graduated in medicine before specializing in psychiatry, which led him to train as a psychotherapist and analyst. He was Consultant Psychotherapist at a London University teaching hospital, and now works in private practice. Among his publications is a study of the phenomenon of “smarginatura” in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, L’Amica geniale. (Carvalho, R. 2018. Smarginatura and Spiragli: Uses of Infinity in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Allegoria 77, 94 – 111.)

Ellen Cassedy is the co-translator, with Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, of Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel.  She won a 2016 PEN/Heim award for her translation of fiction by the Yiddish writer Yenta Mash.  She is the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust.

Pierre Chappuis was born in Tavannes (Canton Bern), Switzerland, in 1930. He is an essential French-language poet in a generation that includes Philippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy, André du Bouchet, Jacques Dupin, and Jacques Réda. His many published works include collections of critical essays, poetic prose, and poetry. Among his most recent books, all published by the Éditions José Corti, are Dans la foulée (2007), Comme un léger sommeil (2009), and Muettes emergences (2011). Distance aveugle (2000) and À la portée de la voix (2002), also brought out by Corti, are collections of short poetic prose. For his writing, he has won two prestigious Swiss literary prizes: the Schiller Prize in 1997 and the Grand Prix C.F. Ramuz in 2005. He lives in Neuchâtel.

Leilei Chen / 莫译 is a literary translator, bilingual writer, and scholar. She published the Mandarin version of Steven Grosby’s Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) with Nanjing’s Yilin Press in 2017 and Hong Kong’s Oxford University Press in 2020. She is the author of Re-orienting China: Travel Writing and Cross-cultural Understanding (University of Regina Press, 2016). Her poetry and prose translations, and poetry and personal essays appear in literary anthologies such as Home: Stories Connecting Us All (Embracing Multicultural Community Development, 2017), Looking Back, Moving Forward (Mawenzi House, 2019), Beyond the Food Court: An Anthology of Literary Cuisines (Laberinto Press, 2020); as well as in journals and magazines in Canada and beyond. She teaches at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Alberta and serves as Vice President of Canada-China Friendship Society of Edmonton and Vice President (West Canada) of the Literary Translators Association of Canada.

Francesco Chianese teaches Italian Literature at the University of Turin (2019-20). He taught Italian and Italian American literature and culture at California State University, Long Beach (2018-19), where he was Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence. He holds an MA in Contemporary Italian Literature from the University of Naples Federico II and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Naples L’Orientale. He has written on Italian, American and Italian American literature and culture and on the representations of the Italian diaspora in several journals and volumes. His book “Mio padre si sta facendo un individuo problematico:” Padri e figli nell’ultimo Pasolini (1966-75) was published in 2018 by Mimesis.

Lúcia Collischonn is a Brazilian-German translator and PhD candidate in Translation Studies at the University of Warwick. She is interested in Exophony in creative writing and translation, that is, writing literature in a foreign language and translation into and out of one’s mother tongue. Exophony was the theme of both her Master’s dissertation and her current PhD research. She has translated Yoko Tawada’s novel Etüden im Schnee (2016) which was published in Brazil in May 2019. Research interests include: translation theory and practice, multilingualism, postcolonialism, contemporary and world literature, Portuguese-language literatures, German-language literatures, transnational literature and adaptation studies.

Nicola H. Cosentino holds a Ph.D. in Politics, Culture, and Development and works on literary narratives, futures, and the relationship between reality and representation. He is a contributor at Corriere della Sera, Esquire Italy, and the cultural blog minima&moralia. He is the author of two novels, the second of which, Vita e morte delle aragoste (Life and Death of the Lobsters, 2017), won the Brancati Giovani Prize in 2018. 

Ilaria Dagnini Brey’s book The Venus Fixers. The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy’ Art was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2009. Her own Italian translation of the book appeared in Italy in 2010 with the title Salvate Venere. She translated Sappho’s poetry from the ancient Greek into Italian. Among her translations from English into Italian are Candia McWilliam’s novels Debatable Land and A Case of Knives, Elizabeth von Arnim’s Love, and, most recently, Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (Elliot Editori, Roma). Born, raised and educated in Padova, Italy, she has lived in New York since 1990.

Chiara De Caprio is Associate Professor of Italian Language and Linguistics at the University of Naples Federico II. She has directed a number of research projects, among which Disaster Texts. Literacy, Cultural Identity, Coping Strategies in Southern Italy Between the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period. As a senior member of the ERC project DisComPose, she coordinates research on narrative strategies of 17^th-century printed texts and studies different discursive genres of the Early Modern age. She has also published on 20^th-century Italian prose and on contemporary Italian narrative and poetry.

Rebecca Dehner-Armand is a literary translator, teacher, and scholar of contemporary French and Francophone literature. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, The Massachusetts Review and Delos. She is currently completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

Tiziana de Rogatis is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Contemporary Italian Literature at the Università per Stranieri di Siena. She is the author, among many scholarly publications, of Elena Ferrante’s Key Words (Europa Editions, 2020).

Ilaria de Seta holds an MPhil in Italian Studies from University College Cork and a Doctorate in Modern Philology from the University of Naples, Federico II. She worked for the Université de Liège until 2018, is Associate Researcher at the KU Leuven, and currently Visiting Professor at Università dell’Aquila. She joined Peter Lang Publishing house as Freelance Editor  in March 2021. She specializes in Modern and Contemporary Literature, with a focus on the space dimension (libraries, domestic spaces, landscapes). Her latest publications are on Federigo Tozzi and Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, and her current research is on doctors and patients in 19th- and 20th-Century European Literature.

Claudia Dellacasa is a PhD student at Durham University (UK), working on the intersection between Japanese culture and Italian literature in the second half of the Twentieth century. She is interested in ecology and trans-cultural dialogue, as well as in post-capitalist and feminist theory.

Milena Deleva is the Executive Director of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF) whose mission is to create a nexus between Anglophone and Bulgarian literary communities. Prior to her work at EKF, Milena was Project Officer at the European Cultural Foundation in Amsterdam and Program Coordinator for Literature at the Soros Foundation in Sofia, Bulgaria. She serves on the Steering Committee of the New Literature from Europe Festival in New York. As a literary arts manager and curator, she has spearheaded many literary and interdisciplinary projects on both sides of the Atlantic.

Nataliya Deleva is a Bulgarian-born writer living in London. Her debut novel Four Minutes (www.fourminutesbook.com), originally published in Bulgaria as Невидими (Janet45 Publishing, 2017) and then in Germany as Übersehen (eta Verlag, 2018) is forthcoming from Open Letter Books in 2021. It won the Best Debut Novel Award and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year in the most respected literary competitions in Bulgaria. Her short fiction, novel excerpts, essays and book reviews appeared in literary journals and anthologies, such as Words Without Borders, Fence, Asymptote, Empty Mirror and Granta Bulgaria. Deleva recently completed her second novel. Twitter: @nataliedelmar.

Jed Deppman was professor and director of Comparative Literature at Oberlin College, where he taught courses in the literary translation concentration until his untimely passing in 2019. The translator of Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes, he was also a member of the collaborative Emily Dickinson Translation Project at the Center for Literary Translation Studies at Fudan University, China.

Rebecca DeWald is a bilingual academic and non-fiction translator with a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the University of Glasgow, working from German, French and Spanish into English and into German. Her monograph Possible Worlds: Jorge Luis Borges’s (Pseudo-)Translations of Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka (IMLR books, 2020) questions the maintenance of a strict distinction between original works and translations. She is Emerging Translator Mentorships Programme Manager at the National Centre for Writing and coordinates the Literature and Translation Programme at Cove Park, Scotland’s international artist residency centre. She also sits on the assessment panel for Publishing Scotland’s Translation Fund, contributes to PEN Translates, New Books in German, and 12 Swiss Books, and runs the monthly Translators’ Stammtisch and Translation Theory Lab at the Goethe-Institut Glasgow.

Nathan H. Dize is a reader, researcher, and translator of Haitian literature. Translator of three Haitian novels The Immortals by Makenzy Orcel (SUNY Press, 2020), I Am Alive by Kettly Mars (UVA Press, forthcoming 2022), and Antoine des Gommiers by Lyonel Trouillot (Schaffner Press, forthcoming). He is also a founding member of the kwazman vwa collective, which amplifies the work of emerging Caribbean authors, and a member of the Editorial Board of Reading in Translation. He teaches French at Oberlin College.

Emma B.B. Doyle is a translator, puppeteer, and cook who graduated in Comparative Literature from Oberlin College in 2019. She is currently translating an erotic memoir from Spanish and weathering the pandemic by growing mushrooms and baking bread in New York.

Sophie Drukman-Feldstein studies creative writing and literary translation at Oberlin College. Their work has previously been published in In These Times and The Oberlin Review. They are the poetry coordinator for Two Groves Review.

Eva Dunsky is an MFA candidate at Columbia University studying fiction and translation. She translates from Spanish and Catalan into English, and also teaches University Writing to undergraduate students. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Columbia Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Vol 1. Brooklyn, among others.

Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and professor. Her essay “Ensenada,” co-translated with Juan Manuel Tabío, appeared in Rialta in September 2020. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Finalist for the National Translation Award. She organized and introduced a May 2021 dossier dedicated to Rodríguez in the digital magazine Latin American Literature Today. Previously she translated numerous poetry editions, such as books by Juan Carlos Flores, Marcelo Morales, Tina Escaja, and others. Selections from Dykstra’s own current poetry manuscript appear in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, Seedings, Clade Song, The Hopper, and La Noria (with translations by Escaja).

Joshua Daniel Edwin‘s poetry appears in a variety of publications in print and online. His translations of Dagmara Kraus’ poetry were awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and appear in a chapbook from Argos Books. He lives in Brooklyn and is a member of the editorial board for the magazine Circumference: Poetry in Translation.

Jacob Emery is a professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He is the author of numerous scholarly works as well as the fantasy novel A Clockwork River, written collaboratively with his sister under the name J.S. Emery. His forthcoming work includes a co-edited and co-translated collection of essays by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Countries That Don’t Exist.

Sebastiaan Faber, Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College, regularly writes for the Spanish and U.S. media, including CTXT: Contexto y Acción, La Marea, FronteraD, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, Conversación sobre la Historia, and Public Books. His most recent books are Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography and Exhuming Franco: Spain’s Second Transition, both published by Vanderbilt University Press. Born and raised in the Netherlands, he has been at Oberlin since 1999. More at sebastiaanfaber.com.

Laura Falgione is a self-proclaimed Russian formalist based in Buenos Aires, currently exorcising the woes of corporate life through literary fiction blogging and translation.

Enrica Maria Ferrara is a Tenured Teaching Fellow of Italian at Trinity College Dublin, as well as a writer and a translator. She has published widely in the field of Italian studies, comparative literature, and film. Her titles include, among others, Calvino e il teatro (Peter Lang, 2011) Staged Narratives / Narrative Stages, co-edited with Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin (Franco Cesati, 2017), the English translation of Disaster Narratives in Early Modern Naples, edited by D. Cecere et al (Rome: Viella, 2018), and the volume Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Enrica is currently working on the last draft of her debut novel in Italian (Agent: Walkabout Literary Agency).

Ben Ffrancon Davies is a freelance translator based in Wales, UK. He translates from French, Spanish, and Welsh into English, working on commercial, journalistic, and literary texts. He is also a writer, with several non-fiction titles published by global publishers including Penguin Random House. Follow him on Twitter @benffd.

Sibelan Forrester teaches Russian language and literature at Swarthmore College and has translated fiction, poetry and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian.

Katie Frevert is a 2022 graduate of Oberlin College, where she majored in Russian and East European Studies and Creative Writing. Her undergraduate thesis, entitled “‘Kill the State in Yourself’: Totalitarianism and the Illiberal Dissidence of Egor Letov,” was awarded highest honors.

Lev Fridman is a Speech-Language Pathologist based in New York City. He has facilitated translation projects and publications, and his own writings and translations have appeared in Ugly Duckling Press, Odessa Review and The Café Review. His most recent research has focused on the literary legacy of Mykola Bazhan.

Ursula Deser Friedman is a Chinese-English translator, instructor, and writer. She received her B.A. in East Asian Studies from Oberlin College, and an M.A. in Chinese-English Translation and Simultaneous Interpretation from Beijing Foreign Studies University, where she has taught Chinese-English translation courses. Her collaborative translation of the volume A Study on the Influence of Ancient Chinese Cultural Classics Abroad by Zhang Xiping et. al. is forthcoming by the Economic Science Press. Ursula’s current research focuses on author-translation and infidelity in translation, particularly the ways in which inadvertent mistranslations shape cultural perception.

James Garza is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at International Christian University in Tokyo. His translations have appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Asymptote, among other places. He is a previous winner of the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation.

Juliana Gaspar studies comparative literature at Oberlin College & Conservatory and translates from Portuguese into English.

Kata Gellen is an Associate Professor of German Studies at Duke University, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies. Her book, Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism, appeared with Northwestern University Press in 2019.

Philip Graham, a Professor Emeritus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Washington Post Magazine, North American Review, Paris Review, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. A co-founder and fiction editor of the literary /arts journal Ninth Letter, he is currently the Editor-at-Large for the journal’s website.  His essays on the craft of fiction and nonfiction can be found at http://www.philipgraham.net Graham is the curator and editor of two anthologies of Bulgarian literature for the Ninth Letter website: “Only Silence Will Never Betray You,” and “Some Kind of Second Heart.”

Alyssa Granacki holds a Ph.D. in Romance Studies and is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University. Her research interests include Italian literature, women writers, feminist thought, and history of philosophy.  

Small Press Distribution has plenty of copies of Eric Gudas’s book, Best Western and Other Poems; his prose about literature, photography, music, and film has appeared in All About Jazz, Raritan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Flash, and elsewhere.

Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón is a Puerto Rican writer, scholar and professor at Oberlin College. His most recent novel, Los días hábiles, will be published in April 2020 by Destino/Planeta México. His translation into Spanish of Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988-2012 was published by Vanderbilt University Press in December 2019.

Barbara Halla is an Assistant Editor for Asymptote. She works as a translator and independent researcher, focusing in particular on discovering and promoting the works of contemporary and classic Albanian women writers. Barbara holds a BA in History from Harvard and has lived in Cambridge, Paris, and Tirana.

Rachel Harland is a German/French-English translator based in Honolulu. She holds a doctorate in German literature from the University of Oxford and recently completed a Humboldt postdoctoral research fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her literary criticism has been published in Austrian Studies and German Life and Letters, and her first book-length translation, a study on environmental economics, is forthcoming in 2015. Follow her @rhtranslation.

Brandy Harrison received her PhD in English Language and Literature from Queen’s University, Canada, in 2019. Her doctoral dissertation, No Man is an Island: Interdependent Conceptions of Selfhood in Wyatt, Donne, and Milton is now freely accessible to the public online. A long-time devotee of Russian history and culture, she blogs about Russian literature at Russophile Reads. She divides her heart and her time between her two countries, Canada and Portugal.

Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Managing Editor for Action Books and the Poetry in Translation Editor at the Kenyon Review. She resides in Ohio, where she is a Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.

Peter Hegarty is a Dublin-based writer. He is the author of Peadar O’Donnell, the biography of the Irish writer and revolutionary. He translates from German and Spanish and has just completed a translation of Carlos Fuentes’s Aura.

Sherilyn Hellberg is a literary translator and Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. In 2018, she received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her translation of Caspar Eric’s NIKE.

Christiana Hills is a translator from the French with a taste for the erudite and the experimental, such as her translation of Oulipo member Michele Audin’s One Hundred Twenty-One Days. She also writes about translation on her personal site and on Intralingo, a blog about both the practical and artistic sides of literary translation.

Alta Ifland is a Romanian-born writer and translator who currently lives in Northern California. She is the author of two collections of prose poems, Voix de glace/Voice of ice (a self-translated, bilingual book, which won the French Prize Louis Guillaume) and The Snail’s Song; and two collections of short stories, Elegy for a Fabulous World and Death-in-a-Box (Subito Press Fiction Prize). She has translated numerous authors from/into French, English and Romanian. She has two novel excerpts forthcoming in Trafika Europe and Apofenie Magazine.

Steven Jacobs is an Italian Studies PhD student at Rutgers University where he has enjoyed teaching Italian language and culture. One of his research projects is on Domenico Starnone’s works.

Sabrina Jaszi is a PhD student in Berkeley’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literature. Her recent translations of the Soviet Thaw-era writer Reed Grachev have appeared in The Offing, Subtropics, and Catapult. She wrote about translating Grachev in the Paris Review Daily. Her translations of the contemporary poet Andrei Rodionov can be found in Sink.

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection Songs from an Apartment and the chapbook Memory Project.  Her translation with Oksana Lutsyshyna of Artem Chekh’s Absolute Zero was released in 2020 by Glagoslav. Her novel Temporary Shelter is forthcoming in 2021 from Cervena Barva Press. Her reviews have been published in LA Review of Books and East West Journal of Ukrainian Studies. She is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series.

Alec Joyner is a PhD student in English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University, specializing in twentieth-century American literature, Francophone literature, the novel, affect theory, feminist theory, and humor and comedy. He translates from French.

Magdalena Kay is professor of English at the University of Victoria, where she teaches modern British and Irish literature. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary poetry. She is the author of three books: Knowing One’s Place in Contemporary Irish and Polish Poetry: Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, Hartwig (Continuum, 2012), In Gratitude for All the Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe (University of Toronto Press, 2012), and Poetry Against the World: Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britain (Routledge, 2018).

Dimiter Kenarov is a freelance journalist, poet, literary critic, translator. He was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, studied in the United States (Middlebury College; University of California – Berkeley), and now lives mostly on the road. He is the author of two collections of Bulgarian poetry (Пътуване към кухнята; Апокрифни животни) and a book of translations of the selected poems of Elizabeth Bishop. His English-language writing has appeared in Esquire, Outside, The Nation, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The International New York Times, and TheVirginia Quarterly Review, among many others. His work has also been anthologized three times in The Best American Travel Writing (2009; 2012; 2013) and has been twice labeled “notable” in The Best American Non-Required Reading. He is a member of PEN-America and The Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria.

Daniel Kennedy is a translator from the Yiddish based in Rennes, France. He serves as translation editor for In Geveb: a Journal of Yiddish Studies, and is currently working on a collection of stories by Hersh Dovid Nomberg.

Stacey Knecht is the translator of Marcel Möring’s The Great Longing, In Babylon and The Dream Room; Hugo Claus’s Desire; Marga Minco’s The Glass Bridge; Anke de Vries’s Bruises; and Lieve Joris’s Back to the Congo. Her first translation from the Czech, Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Harlequin’s Millions, was a runner-up for the Best Translated Book Award (BTBA) 2015. Stacey has been the recipient of several other distinguished accolades, including the James S. Holmes Translation Award (1993) and the Vondel Prize (1996). She is currently translating two more novels by Hrabal, Who I Am and The Tender Barbarian.

Jozefina Komporaly lectures at the University of the Arts London, and translates from Romanian and Hungarian into English. She is editor of the anthologies Matéi Visniec: How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays (Seagull, 2015) and András Visky’s Barrack Dramaturgy: Memories of the Body (Intellect, 2017), and author of numerous publications on theatre and adaptation, including the monographs Staging Motherhood (Palgrave, 2007) and Radical Revival as Adaptation (Palgrave, 2017). Her stage translations were produced in London and Chicago, and recent translations include Mr K Released by Matéi Visniec (Seagull, 2020) and The Glance of the Medusa by László F. Földényi (Seagull, 2020). She has just contributed to the latest edition of Poet Lore, and is currently preparing the critical anthology Plays from Romania: Strategies of Subversion (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Daria Kozhanova is a PhD student in Romance Studies (Italian track) at Duke University. Her main research interests are contemporary Italian women’s writing, gender studies, and ecocriticism, as well as transnational Italian literature and literary translation.

David Kurnick teaches English at Rutgers University. He writes about the nineteenth-century and contemporary novel, and has translated work by Álvaro Enrigue and Julio Cortázar.

Sean Lambert is a graduate student in German at UC Berkeley. He studies affect, aesthetics and politics in early twentieth-century literature and film. He translates from German (and does his best with French.)

Heather Lang-Cassera, Clark County, Nevada’s 2019-2021 Poet Laureate, holds an MFA in Poetry with a Certificate in Literary Translation. In 2017 she was named Las Vegas’ Best Local Writer or Poet by the readers of KNPR’s Desert Companion. Her poems have been published by december, Diode, The Normal School, North American Review, Pleiades, South Dakota Review, and other literary journals. Lang-Cassera serves as World Literature Editor and book reviewer for The Literary Review, Faculty Advisor for 300 Days of Sun, and Editor-in-Chief for Tolsun Books. At Nevada State College, Lang-Cassera also teaches Composition, Creative Writing, World Literature, and more.

Janet Lee holds a M.A. in Literary Translation from New York University and a B.A. in English Literature and French from University of Nevada Reno. Her interests in translation and research include hypertext, travel narrative and experimental genre. She is currently translating Si by Hélène Bessette. She is the founder of Another Way to Say, a translators’ reading series, and works in Foreign Rights at St. Martins Press.

Preea Leelah is a lecturer in the Department of French and Italian at Oberlin College. She specializes in Eighteenth-Century and Francophone Studies, with teaching and research interests in race and gender, French colonial societies, women and crime in Francophone history, and technology in second language acquisition.

Anna Levett is Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Oberlin College. She specializes in Mediterranean studies and global modernism, with particular interest in twentieth-century French, Francophone, and Arabic literature and film. Her current book project concerns the reception of surrealism in Arab literature. She is also at work on a translation of several essays by the Egyptian author Edwar al-Kharrat (1926-2015).

Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (forthcoming from Eulalia Books) and the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (Kenning Editions, 2018). She is a Ph.D. Candidate and Olin Fellow in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is writing a dissertation on translation, revolution, and Latin American neo-avant-gardes.

Kate Lynch is a writer and freelance Spanish to English translator who spent formative years living in Madrid. She recently received a Certificate in Translation from the NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies and is using her experience in multilingual media and web, and real estate brokerage as the foundation for her translation business. She was the recipient of a Literary Translation Award at the NYU SCPS 2014 Literary and Visual Arts Festival.

Fatemeh Madani Sarbarani is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance of the Americas at Arizona State University. She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Dramatic Literature from the University of Tehran, Iran. In 2008, she translated two Argentinian plays The Walls and Antigona Furiosa by Griselda Gambaro into Persian. The Walls was banned from going on stage by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in Iran. Fatemeh Madani is currently working on her doctoral dissertation titled Translating Tomb Dwellers for USAmericans: What the process of translation reveals about counter-censorship strategies among professional theatre artists in Iran.

Jennifer Boum Make is Assistant Professor in the Department of French & Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. Her teaching and research include a focus on migration, and representations of otherness and hospitality in contemporary Caribbean and Mediterranean contexts. Her broad areas of interest include: Francophone postcolonial theory; Caribbean and Mediterranean Studies; ethics; as well as questions of mobility and circulation of people and cultures. She has published or has forthcoming publications in Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, Convergences Francophones, Nouvelles Études Francophones, and Francosphères, among others.

Laura Marris is a poet and translator. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The North American Review, The Yale Review, The Cortland Review, The Volta, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a Daniel Varoujan Award. She teaches creative writing at the University at Buffalo and is currently at work on a new translation of Albert Camus’ The Plague.

Gabriella Martin translates from Spanish and Catalan, and holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Currently based at Aarhus University in Denmark, her academic work explores twentieth and twenty-first century Iberian translational literature.

Samuel Martin is a translator from Fargo, North Dakota; he currently teaches French in Philadelphia. His translations include Georges Didi-Huberman’s Bark (MIT Press, 2017) and Jean-Christophe Bailly’s The Instant and Its Shadow (Fordham University Press, 2020). He is a co-editor at Hopscotch Translation.

Andrew Martino is Dean of the Glenda Chatham & Robert G. Clarke Honors College at Salisbury University where he is also professor of English. He has published on Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Luigi Pirandello, among others. He is a regular reviewer for World Literature Today, and is currently finishing a manuscript on Paul Bowles.

Maria Massucco is a PhD Candidate in Italian at Stanford University with minors in French and in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her current research draws together works of Italian prose, poetry and film from the last century in an investigation of gendered madness. Her work as a translator includes collaboration on several essay volumes, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature, ed. Comparini. 

Brian McLaughlin is a writer, poet, and translator with a B.A. in Spanish and English literature from Case Western Reserve University, who works in educational publishing. He is currently translating into English Antonio Orejudo’s novel Ventajas de Viajar en Tren.

Jenny McPhee is a novelist and translator of works by Anna Banti, Massimo Bontempelli, Cristina Campo, Fausta Cialente, Beppe Fenoglio, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Anna Maria Ortese, Curzio Malaparte, Paolo Maurensig, and Pope John Paul II. A faculty member and administrator at NYU, she has also taught at Princeton and the European School of Literary Translation. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.

Nora Méndez is a recent graduate from Oberlin College, with degrees in Comparative Literature and Mathematics and a minor in Hispanic Studies. She translates from Spanish.

Stiliana Milkova (Editor of Reading in Translation) teaches comparative literature and literary translation at Oberlin College. She has translated from Italian works by Adriana Cavarero, Anita Raja, Antonio Tabucchi, Alessandro Baricco, Andrea Raos, Roberto Carretta, Dario Voltolini, and Tiziano Scarpa. She is the author of Elena Ferrante as World Literature (Bloomsbury Academic).

Alessandro Mondelli is Director of Outreach at Asymptote Journal.  He received his BA in Comparative Literature from Oberlin College. He translates from German, Spanish and Portuguese, and lives in Mexico City. You can find some of his work here.

Maria Morelli is Marie Curie Research Fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the University of Milan, where she also teaches classes on women’s theatre and feminist philosophy for the Department of Cultural Heritage. She is a member of the Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster based at the De Montfort University, UK, and acts as Expert Evaluator for the European Commission. She has taught Italian literature and language at the University of Kent and the University of Leicester (UK), and at Wheaton College (US). Her research interests are in gender, sexuality and embodiment in modern and contemporary Italian literature and theatre, on which she has published several articles and book chapters — especially on writers Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza, Dacia Maraini and Elena Ferrante. She has co-edited the volume Women and the Public Sphere in Modern and Contemporary Italy (Troubador 2017) and published the edited collection Il teatro cambia genere (Mimesis 2019). Her monograph, Queer(ing) Gender in Italian Women’s Writing (2021) is the winner of the Peter Lang Competition in Italian Studies and is featured in the Italian Modernities book series of Peter Lang Oxford Publishing.

Carlotta Moro is a PhD student in the Department of Italian at the University of St Andrews, where she is working on Renaissance feminism and early modern women writers. She holds an MLitt in Women, Writing and Gender, and her research interests include the history of Italian feminist thought, Italian women’s writing, gender theory, feminist theology, ecofeminism, and Elena Ferrante.

Ainsley Morse translates from Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and teaches Russian language & literature at Dartmouth College. With Bela Shayevich, she co-translated Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See (UDP, 2013) and Igor Kholin’s Kholin 66: Poems and Diaries (UDP, 2017). Her book Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature is forthcoming with Northwestern UP.

Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010), translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), and editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016).

Ghada Mourad holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. Her research and teaching focus on translation theory and practice, modernity, and dissenting sexualities in post-1960 Arabic and Francophone literature of the MENA. Her translations appeared in Banipal, Asymptote, English Pen, Jadaliyya, Arablit, Al-Jadid, among others. 

Robin Munby is a freelance translator from Liverpool, UK, based in Madrid. After graduating in Modern Languages from the University of Sheffield, he worked in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, before returning to the UK to complete his Masters in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow. He wrote his dissertation on postcolonial theory and the translation of Central Asian Russophone literature. He is an assessor for the PEN Translates grant scheme, and his translations have appeared in the Glasgow Review of Books, Wasafiri Magazine and the anthology Best Asian Short Stories 2019.

Mary Ann Newman translates from Catalan and Spanish. She has published O’Clock, a collection of short stories and a novel by Quim Monzó, The Hispanic Labyrinth, an essay by Xavier Rubert de Ventós, and Bestiary, a book of poetry by Josep Carner. Her most recent translation is Private Life, a 1932 Catalan classic by Josep Maria de Sagarra (Archipelago Books). She was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1998. She is currently executive director of the Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the U.S., a member of the board of PEN America, a member of the board of the Catalan Institute of America, and a member of the jury of the Premi Internacional Catalunya.

Griffin Nosanchuk is a student at Oberlin College who translates from Spanish and studies psychology and archaeology.

Barbara Ofosu-Somuah is a first year Ph.D. student at Duke University in the Romance Studies program. She is interested in exploring Italy’s colonial past and how Black Italians’ radically imagine belonging in Italy’s present through their writing and other cultural productions. Ofosu-Somuah’s writing and translations have been featured in Words Without Borders, Public Books, Lampblack Magazine, the translation anthology Violent Phenomena by Tilted Axis Press, and elsewhere. In 2020, her introduction accompanied the Italian translation of Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother.

Victoria Olson is a writer and translator from Minneapolis, Minnesota. They recently graduated from Oberlin College, and are currently operating out of the Washington D.C. area, translating a collection of new works from Portuguese into English.

Kirk Ormand is the Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics at Oberlin College. He is the author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (1999),  The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece (2014), and Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (2^nd ed., 2018); he has edited A Companion to Sophocles (2012) and co-edited with Ruby Blondell Ancient Sex: New Essays (2015). He has published articles on Homer, Hesiod, Hipponax, Sappho, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Lucan, the Greek novel, Clint Eastwood, Charles Schneer’s Jason and the Argonauts, and Michel Foucault.

Benjamin Paloff is Associate Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Lost in the Shadow of the Word. Space, Time and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe (Northwestern University Press, 2016). He has also published two collections of poems, And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. A former poetry editor at Boston Review, his poems have appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere, and he has translated several books from Polish and Czech, including works by Richard Weiner, Dorota Maslowska, Marek Bienczyk, and Andrzej Sosnowski.

Salvatore Pappalardo is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Towson University, where he teaches courses in English, Comparative, and World Literature. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature, Italian and Austrian modernism, and Mediterranean Studies. He has published articles and book chapters on James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Bernard Bolzano, Fulvio Tomizza, Scipio Slataper, Claudio Magris, and Leonardo Sciascia. He is the author of the monograph Modernism in Trieste: The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870–1945 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and a B.A. in Translation Studies from the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (SSLMIT) in Trieste, Italy. He is currently writing a book about Sicily as an Arab-Italian crossroads of Mediterranean cultures in twentieth-century Sicilian literature.

Cal Paule is a writer, translator, and teacher from St. Paul, Minnesota. They received their Bachelor’s Degree in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from Oberlin College.

Silvio Perrella is an Italian writer and literary critic from Palermo who lives in Naples.

Julia Peterson is a writer from Montreal, Quebec. After she receives her degree in Psychology and Creative Writing from Oberlin College in spring 2019, she will pursue a Master’s degree in journalism in the fall. She translates from French, and is currently working on a new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

Ekaterina Petrova is a literary translator from the Bulgarian and a bilingual nonfiction writer. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship and helped edit the Exchanges Journal of Literary Translation. Currently based in Sofia, Bulgaria, she has also spent time living, studying, and/or working in Kuwait, St. Paul, New York, London, Berlin, Cuba, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, and the south of France. Her literary translations and nonfiction writing have appeared in various Bulgarian and English-language publications, including Words Without Borders, European Literature Network, Drunken Boat, EuropeNow, and B O D Y. Her translation of Bogdan Rusev’s novel Come to Me was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2019. She is currently working on the translation of two nonfiction anthologies and Iana Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow and the nonfiction anthologies My Brother’s Suitcase and Our Fathers Are Never Gone.

Isabella Pinto holds a PhD European Label in Comparative Studies and Literary Theory from Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata.” She is the coordinator of the Masters Program in Gender Studies and Politics at Università Roma Tre. She is the author of the scholarly monograph Elena Ferrante. Poetiche e politiche della soggettività (2020) and the co-translator of “Storytelling Philosophy and Self Writing: Preliminary Notes on Elena Ferrante. An Interview with Adriana Cavarero” (2020).

Jeannine M. Pitas’s most recent translations are Marosa di Giorgio’s Carnation and Tenebrae Candle (Cardboard House Press, 2020) and Selva Casal’s We Do Not Live In Vain (Veliz Books, 2020). She lives in Iowa and teaches at the University of Dubuque.

Mark Polizzotti is the translator of numerous books from French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, Eric Vuillard, and Patrick Modiano. He is the author, among many other books, of Sympathy for the Traitor. A Translation Manifesto (MIT Press, 2018). He directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Todd Portnowitz is the translator of Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) and Midnight in Spoleto by Paolo Valesio (Fomite, 2018), and the recipient of a Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. A co-founder of the Italian poetry blog Formavera and of the writer-translator reading series Us&Them, he lives in New York, where he works as an Assistant Editor for Alfred A. Knopf. Recent poems and translations can be found in The Cortland Review and Poetry

Patrick Powers studies Russian/East European Studies and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College, and will graduate in 2021. He lives in La Grande, Oregon, translates from Russian and Spanish, and is a member of the Soupbone Collective. 

Minna Zallman Proctor is the author, most recently, of Landslide: True Stories (Catapult, 2017) and translator of Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness, As Such (New Directions, 2019), which was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She is the Editor of The Literary Review and teaches creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Pittsburgh-born Frederika Randall’s translations include Confessions of an Italian by Ippolito Nievo, Deliver Us by Luigi Meneghello, The Communist by Guido Morselli, and his Dissipatio H.G. forthcoming in 2020. Also historian Sergio Luzzatto’s The Body of Il Duce, his Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, and his Primo Levi’s Resistance, as well as contemporary fiction by Helena Janeczek, Igiaba Scego, and Giacomo Sartori (his I Am God, 2019 and Bug, due out in 2021). Awards include a PEN/Heim grant, and with Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature.

Gabi Reigh translates contemporary Romanian literature as well as literature from the interwar era as part of her Interbellum Series project. As part of this project, she has translated Poems of Light by Lucian Blaga and the novels The Town with Acacia Trees and Women by Mihail Sebastian. Her translations of Liviu Rebreanu’s novel Danse Macabre (originally ‘Ciuleandra’) and Sebastian’s play A Star with No Name will be published in 2020.

Michael Reynolds is the Editor in Chief of Europa Editions.

Michele Ricci Bell is Associate Professor of German Studies at Union College (NY). Among her scholarly interests are both GDR Studies and Disability Studies, and she has published and presented in both fields.

Jamie Richards is an American translator and editor based in Milan. Her work has appeared in various periodicals online and in print, and she has translated books by contemporary Italian authors such as Ermanno Cavazzoni, Igiaba Scego, Giovanni Orelli, Gipi, and Manuele Fior. The recipient of an NEA fellowship for her translation of Dolores Prato’s Down the Square No One’s There, she holds an MFA in translation from the University of Iowa and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Oregon.

Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from the Spanish and Chinese. She is the author of a book of poetry, The Reveal, which was published as part of Noemi Press’s Akrilika Series for innovative Latino writing. Her translations include Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes (New Directions), which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and a collected poems of Li Shangyin published in the New York Review Books / Poets series. Her translations of children’s literature include Cao Wenxuan’s Feather (Archipelago Books/Elsewhere Editions) which was an USBBY Outstanding International Book for 2019, and Decur’s When You Look Up (Enchanted Lion) which was named a Best Children’s Book of 2020 by the New York Times. Her essays, poems, and translations have appeared in the publications BOMB, Boston Review, A Public Space, and Gulf Coast among others. She lives outside Boston and works as managing editor of Harvard Review.

Amanda Sarasien is a writer and literary translator working from Portuguese and French into English. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, The MacGuffin and MAYDAY Magazine, among other publications. She also contributes to The Mookse and the Gripes. Follow her @AmandaSarasien.

Lucina Schell (Founder and Contributing Editor) created Reading in Translation in 2013 to promote the critical analysis of the translator’s task in book reviews. She is a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective, and translates poetry from the Spanish. Recent translations include Daiana Henderson’s So That Something Remains Lit (Cardboard House Press, 2018) and Vision of the Children of Evil by Miguel Ángel Bustos (co•im•press, 2018).

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a writer, poet, and translator. Schwartz is the author of more than 20 books, including the poetry collections In Solitary (2002) and See You in the Dark (2012). Her translations from Italian include Smoke Over Birkenau (1998), by Liana Millu, and A Place to Live: Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg (2003).

Header and logo art by Paula Searing.

Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer, editor, and translator who works from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian into English. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis and an MPhil in Comparative Literature from Trinity College Dublin. Her research on multilingualism and the racialization of language brings a relational approach to the study of contemporary North American and Southeast European literatures. With Mirgul Kali and Sabrina Jaszi, she co-founded Turkoslavia, a collective of translators working with Turkic and Slavic languages.

Jessica Sequeira is a writer and translator from California, currently living in Santiago de Chile. Her works include the novel A Furious Oyster (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), the collection of stories Rhombus and Oval (What Books) and the collection of essays Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age (Zero Books). Her translations into English include Liliana Colanzi’s Our Dead World, Rafaela Contreras’s The Turquoise Ring, Adolfo Couve’s When I Think of My Missing Head, Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke, Maurice Level’s The Gates of Hell, Hilda Mundy’s Pyrotechnics and Teresa Wilms Montt’s In the Stillness of Marble, among others.

Andrea Shah is a writer and translator working from Spanish and Portuguese into English. Her translation of a story by the Brazilian writer Verónica Stigger has been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, and she is currently working on translations of short stories by several young Latin American writers. She has previously worked on the business side of the translation industry for over five years.

David M. Smith is a Norwegian-to-English translator. He holds a Humanities MA from the University of Chicago and a National Translator Accreditation from the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. In 2017, he was a Travel Fellow for the American Literary Translators Association Conference in Minneapolis. He is currently a Blog Editor at Asymptote, and starting fall 2018, he will be attending the University of Iowa MFA program in literary translation.

Jordan A. Y. Smith (Ph.D., Comparative Literature UCLA) is Associate Professor of International Humanities at Josai International University, where he teaches Japanese literature/culture, comparative literature, and literary translation. He has translated works by writers such as Yoshimasu Gozo, Mizuta Noriko, Nomura Kiwao, Saihate Tahi, Misumi Mizuki, Fuzuki Yumi, and Alberto Fuguet. He also writes poetry in/between English and Japanese, and was 2017 finalist in Poetry Slam Japan.

D.P. Snyder is a bilingual writer and translator from Spanish. Her translations have appeared in Two Lines Journal, Review: Literature and Art of the Americas, World Literature Today, and Latin American Literature Today, among others. Books: Meaty Pleasures (Katakana Editores 2021), short fiction by Mexican writer Mónica Lavín; Arrhythmias (Literal Publishing & Hablemos, escritoras 2022) by Mexican Jewish writer Angelina Muñiz-Huberman.

Claire Solomon is associate professor of Hispanic studies and comparative literature at Oberlin College. She is the author of Fictions of the Bad Life (2016) and essays on avant-garde theater, Manic Pixie Dream Girls, translation theory, and contemporary music. She has translated Roberto Arlt, Lidia Falcón, and Juan Goytisolo, and is currently writing a novel about higher education.

Olivia Soule has an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Nevada, Reno, and a B.A. in English and Italian from UCLA. She has published work in the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Pudding Magazine, and Q/A Poetry, and has also participated in poetry readings at the Beat Museum in San Francisco and other places.

Honora Spicer is a writer, translator and experiential educator, with an MA in History from Harvard University (2015) and a BA in History and English Literature from Oxford University (2013). Her poetry, essays and translations have appeared in Tripwire, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, World Literature Today, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She has published poetry and non-fiction in translation by Victoria Guerrero and Tilsa Otta.

Andria Spring is an emerging literary translator with a background in translating for intergovernmental and educational institutions. She is a masters candidate in Translation and Interpreting at New York University and is currently working on two non-fiction translations that will be published in 2021 – Dust, a monograph by French photographer Patrick Wack, and Diard & Duvaucel, an account of the first natural history expedition to Singapore.

Jonathan Stone is Associate Professor of Russian and Russian Studies and Chair of Comparative Literary Studies at Franklin & Marshall College (USA).  He studies early Russian modernism, European Decadence, and the print and material culture of the fin de siècle. He is the author of The Historical Dictionary of Russian Literature (Scarecrow Press, 2013) and The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism (Northwestern University Press, 2017). His translations of the poetry of Joseph Brodsky have appeared in a fine press edition published by Nikodim Press. He is currently completing a translation of Andrey Bely’s Symphonies that will introduce this significant work of a seminal modernist writer to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

Oonagh Stransky has translated works by Pasolini, Pontiggia, Lucarelli, Saviano, Pericoli, Stassi, Prunetti, Spaziani, Pope Francis, and is currently translating The Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale with Marla Moffa for NYRB. 

Marcela Sulak’s poetry includes Decency (2015) and Immigrant (2010). She’s co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Her fourth translation, Twenty Girls to Envy Me. The Selected Poems of Orit Gidali (2016), was longlisted for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She hosts the TLV.1 radio podcast “Israel in Translation,” and edits The Ilanot Review. She is Associate Professor of Literature at Bar-Ilan University.

Corine Tachtiris is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and prose translation editor at The Massachusetts Review. As a literary translator, she works primarily on texts by contemporary women authors from the Francophone Caribbean, Africa, and Canada as well as from the Czech Republic.

Sheera Talpaz is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College, where she teaches courses on modern Hebrew, Arabic, and English literatures. Her research focuses on the intersection of politics, poetry, and literary reception, with attention to the figures of the “national poet” and the poet-activist in Palestine/Israel. Outside of her scholarship, Sheera occasionally writes and translates poetry. She splits her time between Oberlin, Ohio and Durham, North Carolina.

Rachel Tay currently resides in Singapore, where is a freelance writer, editor, and translator. She will commence her doctoral studies with the Program in Literature at Duke University this spring.

John Taylor has translated numerous French-language poets, including Philippe Jaccottet, Pierre Voélin, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Catherine Colomb, and Pierre Chappuis. He has recently translated the Italian poet Franca Mancinelli. His most recent collections of poetry are The Dark Brightness (Xenos Books), Grassy Stairways (The MadHat Press), and Remembrance of Water and Twenty-Five Trees (Bitter Oleander Press). Born in Des Moines in 1952, Taylor has lived in France since 1977.

Emily Thompson recently finished an MA in Hispanic Studies at the University of Washington with a thesis on the translation of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. She has translated Blanca Varela’s work from Spanish to English for the Monarch Review and HOOT.  She is from Seattle but has lived in northeastern Spain and southern Mexico. Spanish, Latin, German and Ladino are her languages of interest. Follow Emily on LinkedIn

Spencer Thurlow is the current Poet Laureate of West Tisbury, Massachusetts, USA, where he leads community readings, workshops, and more.  His poetry or translations have appeared in The Georgia Review, Granta, Cincinnati Review, Worcester Review and others. With Eric Hyett, Spencer co-translated “Sonic Peace,” by Kiriu Minashita, (Phoneme Media, 2017), which was shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association’s

Maria Tirelli Sheil is an editor and translator based in Dublin, Ireland. She worked as a writer and an editor for American academic publisher H. W. Wilson for many years. She is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Dublin-based non-profit publisher of literary fiction Betimes Books, for which she volunteers as editorial director. She has edited and translated a number of novels and academic works.

Eloy Tizón (1964, Madrid) was nominated for the Premio Herralde (1995) for his novel Seda salvaje. His collection Velocidad en los jardines (Páginas de Espuma) was chosen by El Pais as one of the most important Spanish-language books of the past 25 years. Tizón is also a literary critic and writing professor.

Serena Todesco is a literary translator and independent researcher in Italian literature and gender studies. She investigates specifically the issues of identity, (self) subjectivation and otherness of the Italian South, and is interested in examining the relationships between philosophies of sexual difference, motherhood and society. She has participated in several international conferences and published essays on contemporary Italian authors (Ferrante, Ortese, Cutrufelli, Attanasio). She has translated Italian and Croatian poets for several magazines and national festivals and abroad. In 2017 she published a monograph, Tracce a margine (Pungitopo), dedicated to questions of genre and gender in the contemporary Sicilian historical novel. Since 2015 her research has focused on motherhood in Italian literature, Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory, along with questions of identity, canon, genre and gender in the Italian South. Serena lives between Zagreb and Sicily.

Turkoslavia is a collective of literary translators—Sabrina Jaszi, Mirgul Kali, and Ena Selimović—working from Turkic and Slavic languages.

Dr. Sevinç Türkkan is a Lecturer of Humanities at Eastman School of Music-University of Rochester. She specializes in cross-cultural studies, the literatures and cultures of the MENA region, and translation studies. She served as a Judge for the 2021 PEN Translation Award. Her translation of The Stone Building and Other Places by the writer and human rights activist from Turkey, Aslı Erdoğan was a finalist for the 2019 PEN Translation Award.

Alex Valente (he/him) is a white European currently living on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ land. He is an award-winning literary translator from Italian into English, though he also dabbles with French. His work has been published in NYT Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, The Short Story Project, and PEN Transmissions.

Russell Scott Valentino is an author, editor, and translator of fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Italian, and Russian. His work has appeared in numerous venues, including Harvard Review, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, Modern Fiction Studies, and Del Sol Review. His translation of Miljenko Jergović’s family saga Kin was published by Archipelago Books in June 2021.

Kelsi Vanada is a poet and a translator from Spanish and sometimes Swedish. Her translations include Into Muteness (Veliz Books, 2020) and The Eligible Age (Song Bridge Press, 2018), and she is the author of the poetry chapbook Rare Earth (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Kelsi is the Program Manager of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in Tucson, AZ.

Helen Vassallo is the founder of Translating Women, an industry-facing research project that engages with publishers, translators and other stakeholders to work against intersectional gender bias in the translated literature sector of the UK publishing industry. She translates Francophone women’s writing (with particular focus on North Africa and the Middle East), and has recently published translations of Darina Al Joundi’s The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing and its sequel Marseillaise My Way. She is currently translating Leïla Slimani’s The Devil is in the Detail, and has just finished writing Towards a Feminist Translator Studies: Intersectional Activism in Translation and Publishing, a study of diversity initiatives in translated literature. Helen tweets about books at @translatewomen.

Lara Vergnaud is an editor and translator who has translated works from the French by Zahia Rahmani, Mohand Fellag, Joy Sorman, Marie-Monique Robin, and Scholastique Mukasonga. Her translation of The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani is forthcoming from New Directions in 2017. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Maurizio Vito holds a laurea in Philosophy from the University of Verona and a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His first book Terra e Mare. Metafore e politica in conflitto was published in 2012. He has published both in English and in Italian, and is at work on a translation from Italian of Stella del mattino by Wu Ming 4. He holds a position as Lecturer at the University of Oklahoma.

Judith Vollmer is author of five books of poetry, including most recently, The Apollonia Poems, awarded the Four Lakes Poetry Prize of The University of Wisconsin Press. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Poetry International, The Women’s Review of Books, The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, Italian Americana, and Great River Review, among many others.

Rebecca Walker holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of St Andrews and is associate lecturer in Italian at St Andrews. Her research is focused on twentieth and twenty-first century women’s writing across languages, where she has worked on Elena Ferrante, Jhumpa Lahiri, Elsa Morante, and Goliarda Sapienza.

Chialan Sharon Wang is visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College. Her research interests include Sinophone literature and film and postcolonial studies.

Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. Working broadly in Opera Studies, he has a forthcoming article, “Excavating Operatic Masculinity” in Cambridge Opera Journal. His dissertation explores the emulation of Western art practices in the court culture of nineteenth-century Siam as a discursive site for negotiating colonial modernity and ethnological imperialism. He studied comparative literature and literary translation at Oberlin College.

Katrin Wehling-Giorgi is is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Durham University, UK. She has published widely on European modernism and twentieth-century and contemporary women’s writing including Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza, Alice Sebold and Elena Ferrante. She is the author of Gadda and Beckett: Subjectivity, Storytelling and Fracture (Oxford: Legenda, 2014), and the co-editor of Goliarda Sapienza in Context: Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Literature (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016) and of the Special Journal Issue Elena Ferrante in a Global Context (Modern Language Notes, 136.1, forthcoming 2021).

Charlotte Whittle is a writer and translator from Spanish. Her translations and essays have appeared in Mantis, Inti, and in the book Defining Moments in History. She is a co-translator of Eduardo González Viaña’s novel, César Vallejo’s Season in Hell, forthcoming from London’s Centre of César Vallejo Studies.

Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski is Assistant Professor at Duke University. She works on Italian literature from comparative perspective, especially in terms of German-language literatures, modernism, and Jewish studies. She has published articles and chapters on Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, Italo Svevo, Scipio Slataper, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others. Her book Kafka’s Italian Progeny (University of Toronto Press, 2020) explores Franz Kafka’s sometimes surprising connections with key writers — from Italo Svevo, Lalla Romano, and Italo Calvino to Antonio Tabucchi, Paola Capriolo, and Elena Ferrante — who shaped Italy’s literary landscape. She received her Ph.D. in Italian and Comparative Literature & Society from Columbia University. She is writing a book on Jewishness in Italian literature.

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