Translators

Carol Ueland is professor emerita of Russian at Drew University. Her scholarly publications focus on Russian poetry, biography and women’s writing. She and Robert Carnevale are the co-translators of Kushner’s Apollo in the Grass (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).

Yi Ungyung is a PhD candidate at Sogang University, Seoul.

Pauline Levy Valensi, born in 1994 in France, is currently completing her master’s degree in French language and literature at the University of Connecticut and in general and comparative literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.

Photo by Margarita Pournara

Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature at Columbia University. Her translations include Margarita Liberaki’s novel Three Summers, shortlisted for the Warwick Women in Translation Prize (2022); the anthology Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, winner of the London Hellenic Prize (2016); and Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems, a Lannan Translation Selection (2009).

Photo by Veena Varghese

Thila Varghese lives in Canada, where she works part-time during the academic year as a Senior Writing Advisor at Western University. Her translations of Tamil literary works have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi Journal), Metamorphoses, National Translation Month, Columbia Journal, and Asymptote.

Catherine Venner is a translator from German who lives in northeast England. She studied European studies in the UK, France, and Germany and has been working as a freelance translator for nearly ten years. Her first full-length book translation was Mika Sakamoto’s Zen in the Garden (Scribe, 2023).

Lawrence Venuti is the author, most recently, of Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (Routledge) and the translator of Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper: Poems (Graywolf), which won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, plus two additional stories by Eduard Màrquez that appear in the January 2014 print edition of WLT. To read Venuti’s essay, “Eduard Màrquez’s Zugzwang: Cosmopolitanism, Minority, Translation,” click here.

Samantha Vila is a student at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. Dr. George Henson, an assistant professor of Spanish translation at Middlebury, is her sponsoring professor.

Anna Vilner is a Russian-born American translator. Her work has appeared in Hart House Review, the Massachusetts Review, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Arkansas. 

Shelby Vincent is the managing editor of Translation Review and a lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas. In her free time, she is a literary translator. Her translation of Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la Tierra (Heavens on Earth) is forthcoming from Deep Vellum Publishing.

Maya Vinokour is a second-year doctoral student in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in themes of spectatorship in modern Russian and German literature. Also a translator, Vinokour won Academia Rossica's Young Translator Award in 2011.

Josephine von Zitzewitz teaches Russian literature at New College, University of Oxford. She is the author of two monographs on Soviet samizdat. Her translations of Russian-language poetry have appeared in journals in the UK and US. She has been a volunteer research associate with “Memorial” St. Petersburg since 2003.

Caroline Waight is an award-winning literary translator working from Danish, German, and Norwegian. She has translated a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, with recent publications including The Lobster’s Shell, by Caroline Albertine Minor (2022); Island, by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen (2021); and The Chief Witness, by Sayragul Sauytbay and Alexandra Cavelius (2021). She lives and works near London

Kizer S. Walker is an academic librarian, translator, and writer in Ithaca, New York. His translation of Martin Seel’s The Arts of Cinema was published by Cornell University Press in 2018.

Ting Wang’s translations are published or forthcoming in Ploughshares, Southern Review, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Denver Quarterly, Asymptote, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Vermont Studio Center / Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry & Translation Fellowship, she holds a PhD from Northwestern University and lives and works in the Washington metropolitan area.

Julie Ann Ward was born in Oklahoma in 1983. She is an assistant professor of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature at the University of Oklahoma. 

Cecilia Weddell is an associate editor at Harvard Review and a PhD candidate at the Boston University Editorial Institute, where she is editing and translating the essays of Rosario Castellanos. Her translations have appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Literary Imagination, Exchanges, and elsewhere.

Max Weiss is an Arabic translator and an associate professor of history and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His most recent book is Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present, co-edited with Jens Hanssen.

Steven F. White is finishing an ecocritical study of Nicaraguan poetry. He translated Seven Trees against the Dying Light by Pablo Antonio Cuadra and The Angel of Rain by Cuban Gastón Baquero and is the co-author of Ayahuasca Reader. His most recent book of poetry is Bajo la palabra de las plantas (poesía selecta: 1979–2009). He teaches Latin American lierature at St. Lawrence University.

Tegan White-Nesbitt is an Alaskan artist from Fairbanks. She met Walle Sayer as book, then man, while studying linguistics at the Eberhard-Karls University in Tübingen.

Simon Wickham-Smith is international director of the Mongolian Academy of Poetry and Culture and co-directs the Orchuulga Foundation, which is dedicated to the translation of Mongolian literature. A 2008 grant recipient of the PEN Translation Fund for his work on O. Dashbalbar, he was likewise recognized as a Leading Cultural Worker by the government of Mongolia for this translation work. His interview with Sara Wilson, along with additional translated poems, appears in the September 2014 print edition of WLT.

Sam Wilder is completing a PhD in Arabic studies at Cambridge University in the UK and is also the translator of Ghassan Zaqtan’s novella Describing the Past, forthcoming from Seagull Books in 2016.

Elaine Wilson is a writer, literary translator, language instructor, and PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

Sharni Wilson is an Aotearoa New Zealand writer of fiction and a literary translator from the Japanese. She has translated fiction by leading contemporary Japanese writers such as Kaori Ekuni, Masatomo Tamaru, and Fumio Takano. Her work has appeared in Landfall, Asymptote, and the Best of Auckland, among others. In 2023 she won the inaugural At the Bay | I te Kokoru award for a hybrid manuscript. 

Sholeh Wolpé is a recipient of the PEN/Heim Translation award and the Lois Roth Persian Translation prize as well as the author of six collections of poetry, several plays, three books of translations, and three anthologies.

Worley and Birkhofer

Paul M. Worley (b. 1976, Charleston, South Carolina) is a settler-scholar and professor of Spanish at Appalachian State University, where he serves as chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.  

Christiane Wyrwa studied German and English literature at Göttingen, Durham GB, and Berlin, where she took a PhD in 1981. With her husband, Matthias Klein, she edited Kuno Raeber’s Collected Works in seven volumes from 2002 to 2010.

Displaced from his home by the Islamic State’s attempt to exterminate the Êzîdî, Zêdan Xelef (b. 1995, Izêr) arrived with his family to the Chamishko IDP camp in late 2014. His current projects include translating Whitman’s Song of Myself into Kurmanji.

Xin Xu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. She translates classical Chinese prose and contemporary Chinese poetry; her translations of three poems by Yi Sha recently appeared in World Literature Today.

Aicha Yassin is Palestinian and was born in Arrabe, near Nazareth. She holds an English literature degree and is currently studying medicine. She has done numerous translations and holds storytelling workshops.