Translators

Ainsley Morse teaches in the Russian department at Dartmouth College and is a translator of Russian, Ukrainian, and former Yugoslav literatures. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the postwar Soviet period, particularly unofficial or “underground” poetry, as well as contemporary russophone poetry, East European avant-gardes, and children’s literature.

Maryam Mortaz is an Iranian American writer and translator. Her work has been published in such journals as Bomb, New Review of Literature, and Callaloo. She is a trained psychotherapist in New York City.

Cheryl Moskowitz is a US-born, UK-based poet, novelist, and playwright and was a lecturer at Sussex University where she taught creative writing and personal development at the graduate level from 1996 to 2010. Her publications include a novel, Wyoming Trail (Granta, 1998), and the poetry collection The Girl Is Smiling (Circle Time Press, 2012). She was a prizewinner in the 2010 Bridport and Troubadour Poetry Competitions and the 2011 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

Amy Motlagh is the translator of The Space Between Us, by Zoya Pirzad, and the author of Burying the Beloved. She teaches at UC Davis.

Dipika Mukherjee’s work, focusing on the politics of modern Asian societies, includes the novels Ode to Broken Things (longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize) and Shambala Junction (which won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction). She has been mentoring Southeast Asian writers for over two decades and has edited five anthologies of Southeast Asian fiction. She is a contributing editor for Jaggery and serves as core faculty at StoryStudio Chicago and teaches at the Graham School at University of Chicago.

Colleen Mullen studied English literature and Spanish at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. After earning her bachelor’s degree in 2010, she continued to develop her affinity for Spanish while teaching English in Spain. Colleen works full-time as a writer for the Texas Legislative Council and volunteers as a Spanish-to-English translator for the Rainforest Partnership. She resides in her hometown of Austin, Texas.

Translator Lisa Mullenneaux

Lisa Mullenneaux is the author of Naples’ Little Women: The Fiction of Elena Ferrante and has reviewed Ferrante’s La Frantumaglia for WLT. She teaches writing for the University of Maryland UC.

Robin Munby is a freelance translator from Liverpool, based in Madrid. His translations have appeared in the Glasgow Review of Books, Wasafiri, Subtropics, and the Cambridge Literary Review, and he has written for Reading in Translation and Asymptote. He is currently learning Asturian.

Pablo Landeo Muñoz writes poetry and short fiction and is the founding editor of the Atuqpa Chupan literary magazine. In 2018 he was awarded the Peruvian National Prize for Literature in Indigenous Languages for his Quechua-language novel Aqupampa.

Mark Mussari earned his PhD in Scandinavian languages and literature from the University of Washington. He has translated Danish novels, short stories, and nonfiction for numerous publishers. His recent works include translations of Erik Valeur’s novel The Man in the Lighthouse and Michael Müller’s Børge Mogensen: Simplicity and Function. Mussari is also the author of Danish Modern: Between Art and Design (Bloomsbury, 2016). 

Robin Myers is a Mexico City–based translator and poet. She was among the winners of the 2019 Poem in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets). Recent book-length translations include The Restless Dead, by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press, forthcoming); Cars on Fire, by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter, 2020); Animals at the End of the World, by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press, 2020); and Lyric Poetry Is Dead, by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg (Cardboard House, 2018).

Photo by Victor Dlamini

André Naffis-Sahely’s debut collection of poetry, The Promised Land, will be published by Penguin in 2017. He has translated works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Alessandro Spina, Rashid Boudjedra, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Abdellatif Laâbi, among various others.

Shahla Naghiyeva is a professor of literature and translation studies at the Azerbaijan University of Languages.

Michael M. Naydan is Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies and a prolific translator from Ukrainian and Russian. He is currently in the process of compiling an anthology of contemporary Ukrainian women writers and is completing a translation of Iren Rozdobudko’s novel The Button with Olha Tytarenko. His essay on Ukrainian literary identity after the Orange Revolution appeared in the September 2005 issue of WLT.

Maria Nazos’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker. Her translation of Dimitra Kotoula’s chapbook appeared in Mid-American Review.

Denise Newman is a translator and a poet who has published three collections of poetry. She has translated two books by Denmark’s greatest modernist author, Inger Christensen, and her work has appeared widely, including in Denver Quarterly, Volt, Fence, New American Writing, and ZYZZYVA.

Rita Nezami is a scholar and translator who teaches writing and world literature at SUNY Stony Brook. In 2016 Northwestern University Press published her translations of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s writings on the Arab Spring. She is currently translating Ben Jelloun’s 2016 novel on racism in Morocco, Le Mariage de Plaisir.

Allana C. Noyes is a literary translator from Reno, Nevada. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. Her translations have been published in Asymptote, Lunch Ticket, Mexico City Lit, and elsewhere.  

Amy Olen is assistant professor of translation and interpreting studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her research interests include Latin American literature, literary translation, and interpreting studies. She is a contributing translator for the journal Latin American Literature Today and translator of the bilingual edition Luisa Capetillo: escalando la tribuna (Editora Educación Emergente, 2022).

Photo by Ilana Horwitz

Shoshana Olidort is a writer, translator, and critic. She earned her PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University and is an editor at the Poetry Foundation. Her work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Paris Review Daily, LARB, and Jewish Currents, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.

Calvin Olsen is a poet and translator based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His translation of João Luís Barreto Guimarães’s Mediterranean won the Willow Run Poetry Book Award and is forthcoming from Hidden River Arts.

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry. She is also an anthologist and translator of Filipino authors Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Rogelio Braga, and Marlon Hacla.

Oded Even Or is a writer and translator born in Tel Aviv. He graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2019 and now lives in Philadelphia, where he is pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Penn.

Katalin Orbán is a scholar and translator who writes about graphic narratives, cultural memory, and changing modes of reading. Her works have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, and other journals. 

Eugene Ostashevsky is the author, most recently, of The Feeling Sonnets (2022). As a translator of experimental literature in Russian, he has worked on futurism, the OBERIU group, and contemporary poetry, as well as Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets (2022).

Toti O’Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. She was born in Rome, then moved to Los Angeles, where she makes a living as a self-employed artist, performing musician, and professional dancer. Her work has most recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Pub, The Moth, and Wilderness House.

José Emilio Pacheco is a Mexican author, poet, and translator. His poetry and literature have earned a number of prestigious awards, such as the Miguel de Cervantes prize recognizing lifetime achievement in Spanish language literature. Pacheco has taught at several universities in Mexico and the United States, and he is a member of the Mexican Academy of Language and the National College.

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.