Translators

Jeremy Paden (b. 1974, Milan, Italy) is a poet, translator, and professor of Latin American literature at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, and teaches literary translation in Spalding University’s MFA. His bilingual, illustrated children’s book, Under the Ocelot Sun, won the 2020 Ada-Campoy Prize for Children’s Literature from the North American Academy of Spanish Language. And his bilingual collection of poems, Autorretrato como una iguana, which co-won the first Poeta en Nueva York Prize by Valparaíso Ediciones, has just been published.

Lynn E. Palermo, associate professor of French at Susquehanna University, has published translations, some with Catherine Zobal Dent, in the Kenyon Review Online, Exchanges Literary Journal, and Short Story Journal. In 2015 Palermo and Dent received a French Voices Award for Destiny’s Repairman, by Cyrille Fleischman

Stephanie Papa is a poet and translator based in Paris, France. She is a PhD candidate at Paris 13 University and is the poetry co-editor for Paris Lit Up magazine. Her work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Verve Press, Niche, Four Chambers Press, and more.

Viorica Patea is associate professor of American literature at the University of Salamanca and has published books on American poetry and modernism.

Lauren Peat’s poems, translations, and interviews have appeared in AGNI, Asymptote, The Puritan, Volume, and elsewhere; her writing is also featured in the repertoire of acclaimed vocal ensembles across Canada. She currently lives on traditional Coast Salish territory (Vancouver), and at laurenpeatwrites.com.

Nathalia Pereira Jardim (b. 1993) is a literary translator and writer. Her credentials include an MA in Portuguese-English (to be completed in 2024) and previous studies in screenwriting at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU). She lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Bob Perelman is a poet and Associate Chair of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published over fifteen volumes of poetry, most recently Iflife (2006) and Ten to One: Selected Poems (1999). His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (1996) and The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (1994). He has edited Writing/Talks (1985), a collection of talks by poets.

Zoë Perry’s translations of contemporary Brazilian literature have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Words Without Borders, and the White Review. She is a founding member of the Starling Bureau, a literary translators’ collective, and was selected for a Banff International Literary Translation Centre residency for her translation of Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol.

Photo by Margaret Snead

Kerri Pierce has translated fiction and nonfiction from seven languages. Her translation of The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am, by Kjersti A. Skmosvold, was a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award.

Marta Pilarska works in film and theater in her hometown of Łódź, Poland.

Lydia Platón Lázaro is an independent professor in the English department at UPR Cayey. She has published two books: Defiant Itineraries: Caribbean Paradigms in American Dance and Film (2015) and El cuarto acto (2005) with visual artist Paloma Todd. In addition to her academic work, she is a translator, community arts promoter, and performer.

Kevin M. F. Platt is a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on Russian poetry, history, and memory in Russia and eastern Europe, global russophone culture, and translates poetry from Russian and Latvian. His new book, Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders, is forthcoming in 2023.

Kevin M. F. Platt is a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on Russian poetry, history, and memory in Russia and eastern Europe, global russophone culture, and translates contemporary Russian poetry. He is the editor of Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin, 2019). His new book, Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press / Northern Illinois University Press in 2023.

Jacquelyn Pope’s first collection of poems, Watermark, was published by Marsh Hawk Press; Hungerpots, her translation of the Dutch poet Hester Knibbe, was published by Eyewear. She is the recipient of a 2015 NEA Translation Fellowship and a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.

Jean-Jacques Poucel is the author of Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory (2006) and has written articles on the Oulipo, some of which appear in Pereckonings (Yale French Studies 105), Constrainted Writing I & II (Poetics Today 30.4 & 31.1), and in the Oulipo dossier at www.DrunkenBoat.com (issue 8). His translations of Emmanuel Hocquard's Conditions of Light (2010) and Anne Portugal's Flirt Formula (2012) have both been published by La Presse (Fence Books). In 2011–2012 he was a Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, Cologne, Germany. He is currently visiting faculty at the University of Calgary and at the University of Paris VII–Denis Diderot. 

Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma is an author, poet, performer, and teacher. His books include The Safety of Edges and Give, Eat, and Live: Poems of Avvaiyar. Pruiksma teaches writing for Cozy Grammar and has received grants and fellowships from the Valley Community of Writers, the US Fulbright Program, the American Literary Translators Association, and Oberlin Shansi.

Artem Pulemotov is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Queensland, Australia. He holds a PhD from Cornell and a bachelor’s degree from Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University.

Iqbal Qaisar is a historian and Punjabi poet. He has published two books of poetry and six nonfiction books in Punjabi and two books of history in Urdu. He is the director of Punjabi Kohj Garh, an institute promoting research in Punjabi history and culture.

Omar Qaqish is a teaching fellow in English at Le Moyne College in Syracuse and a doctoral candidate at McGill University. He teaches and researches literature by Arab authors writing in English, Arabic, French (and sometimes Italian).

Michelle Quay is currently visiting lecturer of Persian at Brown University. She holds a doctorate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, and her translation work has appeared in Words Without Borders, Two Lines, Asymptote, and eXchanges, among others.

Mahmud Rahman is a Bangladeshi writer and translator now based in California. His collection of stories Killing the Water appeared in 2010, and his translation of Mahmudul Haque’s Black Ice appeared in 2012. His article "Pulp Fiction in Bangladesh: Super Spies and Transplant Authors" appeared in the May 2008 issue of WLT.

Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez is a Seattle-based poet and translator born to Guatemalan immigrants. As a translator, she focuses on Indigenous literatures of Latin America, especially from Mesoamerica. Her translations of Rosa Chávez (Maya K’iche’ and Kaqchikel), with whom she regularly collaborates, appear in Poetry, Asymptote, and elsewhere.

Margaret Randall (b. 1936, New York) is a poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer, and social activist. She lived in Latin America for twenty-three years (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua). From 1962 to 1969 she and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón co-edited El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary quarterly that published some of the best new work of the sixties. When she came home in 1984, the government ordered her deported because it found some of her writing to be “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” With the support of many writers and others, she won her case in 1989. Randall’s most recent poetry titles include As If the Empty Chair / Como si la silla vacia, The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones, About Little Charlie Lindbergh, and She Becomes Time (all from Wings Press). Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led By Transgression (2015) and Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity (2017) were published by Duke. Randall has also devoted herself to translation, producing When Rains Become Floods, by Lurgio Galván Sánchez, and Only the Road / Solo el Camino, an anthology of eight decades of Cuban poetry (both also published by Duke). Randall lives in New Mexico with her partner (now wife) of more than thirty years, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels extensively to read, lecture, and teach.

At any given moment, words in three different languages were heard around the dinner table in writer Kristina Zdravič Reardon’s childhood. She finds that translating literature from her grandparents’ native Slovene and Spanish to English is a challenging—yet somehow natural—pursuit. Reardon holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and has been awarded a Fulbright translation grant and a summer fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Matt Reeck has won grants from the NEA, the Fulbright Foundation, and the PEN-Heim Fund. Forthcoming translations include Chamoiseau’s French Guiana: Memory-Traces of the Penal Colony and Zahia Rahmani’s “Muslim”: A Novel.

Gabi Reigh won the Stephen Spender Prize in 2017. She has also translated Poems of Light by Lucian Blaga and two novels by Mihail Sebastian.

Jamie Richards, currently a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Oregon, is the translator of several literary works from Italian, including Giancarlo Pastore's Jellyfish (2008), Nicolai Lilin's Free Fall (forthcoming in 2011), and Giovanni Orelli's Walaschek's Dream (forthcoming in 2012).

Wendell Ricketts is the editor of Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life. His fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Salt Hill, Blue Mesa Review, and The Long Story, among others. He holds a degree in creative writing from the University of New Mexico and has worked as a translator from Italian since 1998; his translation of the plays of Natalia Ginzburg, The Wrong Door, was published by the University of Toronto Press.

Frances Riddle has translated many Spanish-language authors including Isabel Allende, Claudia Piñeiro, Leila Guerriero, and Sara Gallardo. Her translation of Elena Knows, by Claudia Piñeiro, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Queen Sofía Translation Prize in 2022, and her translation of Theatre of War, by Andrea Jeftanovic, was granted an English PEN Award in 2020.

Cia Rinne was born in Sweden from a Finnish family and raised in Germany. Rinne has studied in Frankfurt am Main, Athens, and Helsinki. Rinne is the author of the books zaroum and notes for soloists as well as a collaborator on numerous multimedia and performance works.