Translators

Born in China, Y. Elaine Chang has lived in the United States since college. She changed her focus to writing after a decade of work in engineering. Her poems and essays have been published in Chinese, and her translation of a Tibet travelogue appeared in Outside magazine’s China edition.

Hamida Banu Chopra teaches Urdu language and literature as a visiting scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and is an internationally renowned reciter of Urdu poetry. She received her MA in philosophy from Rajasthan University and an advanced degree in Urdu from Aligarh University. Her co-translations of Urdu poetry have appeared in TWO LINES: World Writing in Translation, Circumference, and Born Magazine.

Nasreen Chopra is a physicist who has studied Urdu poetry. She is bilingual in English and Urdu. 

Alex Cigale’s Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings is a Northwestern World Classic. He was awarded a 2015 NEA Literary Translation Fellowship for his work on the St. Petersburg philological school poet Mikhail Eremin.

Lyn Coffin is a widely published poet, translator, playwright, and fiction writer. Her translation of Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther Skin will appear in 2015. Her collection of short fiction is about to be published by Iron Twine Press, and a few of her plays will be published by Whale Road Press in 2015. She has published nineteen books. She teaches professional and continuing education at the University of Washington. She has the good sense to recognize Mohsen Emadi as a master and to love him as a brother

Jessica Cohen is an award-winning translator of contemporary Israeli prose, poetry, and other creative work. Her translations include works by major Israeli writers including Amos Oz, David Grossman, Etgar Keret, Dorit Rabinyan, Ronit Matalon, and Nir Baram, as well as Golden Globe–winning director Ari Folman.

Photo courtesy of the translator

Steven Cohen has worked as a translator for more than thirty years and, as a journalist, on the desk of the International Herald Tribune–Haaretz English edition. He currently lives in Hod Hasharon.

Isabel Fargo Cole is a US-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her other translations include The Sleep of the Righteous, by Wolfgang Hilbig (Two Lines Press); The Jew Car, by Franz Fühmann; Collected Essays, by Friedrich Dürrenmatt; and “I,” by Wolfgang Hilbig (all with Seagull Books). She also edits the online translation journal no man’s land.

Peter Constantine’s recent translations include works by Augustine, Rousseau, Machiavelli, and Tolstoy; he is a Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories, by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. He is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Charlotte Coombe is a British literary translator working from French and Spanish into English. A two-time PEN Translates award winner and shortlisted for the Valle Inclán Translation Prize in 2019 for her translation of Margarita García Robayo’s Fish Soup, she is also co-founder of the Translators Aloud YouTube project, which shines a spotlight on literary translators reading from their work. She is currently co-translating En diciembre llegaban las brisas by Colombian author Marvel Moreno (Europa Editions, 2022)

Adam W. Coon is a PhD candidate in Iberian and Latin American languages and cultures at the University of Texas at Austin. He has extensively researched present-day Nahua literary production throughout Mexico. His current project is entitled Iajki Estados Onidos: The Articulation of Nahua Identities in Migration in Contemporary Nahua Literature, 1985–2012.

Alice Copple-Tošić is a professional literary translator from French, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian into English. She has translated nearly one hundred books, including seventeen by Zoran Živković.

Rachel Cordasco (sfintranslation.com) has a PhD in literary studies and currently works as a developmental editor. She also writes reviews for publications like World Literature Today and Strange Horizons and translates Italian speculative fiction.

Margaret Jull Costa has translated such Portuguese and Spanish authors as Eça de Queiroz, José Saramago, Javier Marías, and Sophia de Mello Breyner. Twice the recipient of the Portuguese Translation Prize, in 2014 she received the Order of the British Empire for service to literature.

Bojana Coulibaly is the African Language Program Manager at Harvard University. She has taught African literary and cultural studies at several universities and was a Fulbright recipient at Gaston Berger University. She holds a PhD in African studies from the University of Tours. Her work focuses on publishing in African languages and the promotion of African languages in education and the African public space. She is the managing editor of EJO Editions, a publishing house specializing in literature written in Wolof and other African national languages, founded by Boubacar Boris Diop.

John K. Cox is professor and department head in history at North Dakota State University in Fargo. He received his undergraduate degree from Guilford College and earned his doctorate at Indiana University. The History of Serbia (2002), Slovenia: Evolving Loyalties (2005), and translations of novels by Danilo Kiš and Ivan Cankar are among his chief publications.

Mary Crow has published poetry as well as translation. Her translations include From the Country of Nevermore, by Jorge Teillier (Chile); Engravings Torn from Insomnia, by Olga Orozco (Argentina); Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems; and Vertical Poetry: Last Poems, both by Roberto Juarroz (Argentina). Crow received the Translation Award for her anthology of Latin American women poets from Columbia University’s Translation Center. She served on PEN USA’s Translation Committee and as secretary-treasurer for the American Literary Translators Association.

Mattea Cussel is an Australian translator and predoctoral researcher based in Barcelona. Her translation of the Spanish writer Menchu Gutiérrez appeared in Asymptote.

Alton Melvar M. Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s Philippine editor-at-large, has contributed to Modern Poetry in Translation, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Rusted Radishes, Tolka, and Reliquiae.

Joana Darezzo was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. After receiving a BA in languages and literature at Pontifical Catholic University–São Paulo, she moved to San Francisco, California, where she received an MFA in creative writing at California College of the Arts. She is currently back in her hometown, teaching English as a foreign language to adults and teenagers.

Mona Darwazah has a BA in political science, is a researcher and human rights activist, and has more than thirty years’ experience working with national and international organizations on refugees and human development policy programming. She lives in Jordan.

Jeon Daye (MA) lives in Seoul and is a freelance translator.

Leticia de la Paz is a lecturer and a literary translator. A doctoral student at the University of Granada, she is currently working toward the completion of her PhD thesis on the analysis of the translated poems of American author Adrienne Rich with a gender perspective. Her research focuses on topics such as literary translation, censorship in translation, and gender and feminist studies.

Photo: Gordon Wenzel

Catherine Zobal Dent is a fiction writer and translator. Her debut collection, Unfinished Stories of Girls, came out with Fomite in 2014. She is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University.

Author of critical essays, translations, and poems, Paul Scott Derrick teaches American literature at the University of Valencia in Spain. 

Whitney DeVos is a scholar, translator, and writer. Much of her current work focuses on lenguas originarias, the autochthonous languages of the Americas. She lives in Mexico City, where she is studying Náhuatl with the support of an NEA Translation Fellowship and a Global South Translation Fellowship from Cornell University's Institute for Comparative Modernities.

Lisa Dillman teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University and translates from the Spanish. She has translated three Yuri Herrera novels, the third of which, Kingdom Cons, will be published in July 2017.

Dan Disney teaches twentieth-century poetry at Sogang University, Seoul.

Photo by Sydne Gray

Arthur Dixon is a writer and translator from Oklahoma. He is managing editor of Latin American Literature Today, and he blogs at El Greñudo.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon is co-founder, lead translator, and managing editor of the multilingual literary journal Latin American Literature Today. His work has been featured in Asymptote, Boston Review, International Poetry Review, Literary Hub, Poesía, Trafika Europe, and World Literature Today. He works as a community interpreter in Tulsa and is a Tulsa Artist Fellow. Photo by Sydne Gray