Translators

Chamini Kulathunga is a Sri Lankan translator. She is a graduate of the Iowa Translation Workshop. She was a visiting fellow at Cornell University’s South Asia Program in the summer of 2019 and was the former blog editor and a staff editor in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Review, Exchanges, DoubleSpeak, Bengaluru Review, and elsewhere.

Ilana Kurshan is the author of If All the Seas Were Ink, published in 2017 by St. Martin’s Press.

Photo by Danielle Aquiline

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (2015), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize, and the poetry collection Wolf Lamb Bomb (April 2021). She is The Forward’s language columnist and an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago. 

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Anna Kushner’s translation of Marcial Gala’s The Black Cathedral was released in 2020 to rave reviews in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and other major publications. It is newly out in paperback. Her translation of Leonardo Padura’s The Transparency of Time is forthcoming from FSG this summer. As a writer, Kushner has published poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction in Crab Orchard Review, Cuba Counterpoints, Wild River Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.

Sunja Kim Kwock’s work focuses on the conjunction of Buddhism and Christianity, particularly liberation theology.

Matthew Landrum holds an MFA from Bennington College. His translations of Jóanes Nielsen have appeared in Image Journal, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Jamie Lauer completed a certificate in literary translation at Indiana University, Bloomington, along with a master’s in comparative literature. Under the guidance of Professor Bill Johnston, she has translated different authors from across Latin America, but Chilean literature and Chilean Spanish hold a special place in her heart because of the four months she lived in Chile.

Photo by David Gasser

Aurora Lauzardo Ugarte is a tenured professor and chair of the Graduate Program in Translation at the University of Puerto Rico. Her work includes literary, theater, scholarly, and audiovisual translations into both Spanish and English.

Charles LeBel is the translator of five essays published in a recent Routledge collection, and his own writing has appeared in the journals alter/nativas and Border Lines.

Jane Lee (b. 1974, Seoul) graduated from Queens College, City University of New York, with a bachelor’s degree in English. She has been working as a professional translator for over ten years. Passion for Korean literature and love of writing drove her to study literary translation at the Korea Language Translation Institute in 2010 and 2011. Now residing back in South Korea, she is currently studying Korean writers and their works and writing her own short stories.

Dade Lemanski lives in western Massachusetts. She teaches teenagers, hikes, and works as the copyeditor of In geveb, a new digital journal of Yiddish studies.

Rika Lesser, twice the recipient of translation prizes from the Swedish Academy, is the author of four books of poems and seven books of poetry in translation. She resides in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Henry Wei Leung is the author of Goddess of Democracy (2017). He is studying at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

An eminent translator of Latin American literature and Guggenheim Fellow, Suzanne Jill Levine’s recent works include her five-volume edition of Jorge Luis Borges’s poetry and nonfictions for Penguin paperback classics, the anthology Untranslatability Goes Global (Routledge), and her translation of Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (Seven Stories).

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a poet, translator, and assistant professor. She serves as the director of Kashkul (see WLT, July 2018) and the Slemani UNESCO City of Literature.

Photo ©Nick Levitin

Alexis Levitin’s forty books of translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words. He has received two NEA translation grants.

Dong Li was born and raised in P.R. China. He is German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2015–2016) as well as Literature Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015–2017). He was Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Poet-in-Residence (2013–2014). His honors include fellowships from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and elsewhere. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, manuskripte (Austria, in German translation), and others.

Andrea Lingenfelter is the award-winning translator of The Kite Family, by Hong Kong writer Hon Lai Chu, The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming, the novels Farewell My Concubine and Candy, poetry by many modern and contemporary Sinophone writers, and subtitles for several films. She is currently translating Wang Anyi’s historical novel Scent of Heaven for Penguin. 

Mark Lipovetsky is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. Among his many publications are books on Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Dmitry Prigov, and post-Soviet literature. Lipovetsky is also one of four co-authors of A History of Russian Literature (Oxford, 2018). He was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for his contributions to literary studies.

Carol Rose Little is an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. She has been working in Ch’ol communities in Chiapas, Mexico, since 2015. Her translations of Ch’ol poetry with Charlotte Friedman have been published in Exchanges, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere.

Anni Liu was born in Xi’an, in Sha’anxi Province. Her other translations of Du Ya’s poems can be found in Columbia Journal, Two Lines, the Asymptote blog, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Border Vista (Persea, 2022), received the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize, and she has been awarded fellowships from Undocupoets and the American Literary Translators Association. She holds an MFA from Indiana University and works at Graywolf Press.

Hanoch Livneh is a native of Israel (born in Jerusalem). He moved to the United States in 1972 and, prior to retiring in 2013, served as a professor and coordinator of the Clinical Rehabilitation Counseling Program at Portland State University. He lives in Beaverton, Oregon. 

Jennifer Lobaugh is an American poet and translator. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Southampton Review and New Poetry in Translation.

Jacqueline Loss, professor of Latin American literature at the University of Connecticut, is the author of Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary and translator of Jorge Mañach’s An Inquiry into Choteo.

Olivia Lott’s translations of Colombian poetry have appeared most recently in Mantis, Río Grande Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Waxwing.

Marit MacArthur is an associate professor of English at CSU Bakersfield and recently earned an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her translations, poems, and reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Verse, Southwest Review, Yale Review, ZYZZYVA, and Airplane Reading, among other journals.

Aditi Machado is a writer and translator from Bangalore, India. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver.

Jamie Mackay is a writer and translator based in Florence. His work has appeared in the Guardian, TLS, WLT, Frieze, and elsewhere. He writes the popular newsletter “The Week in Italy” and is the author of The Invention of Sicily (2021).

Carolann Caviglia Madden’s work has appeared in Women in Clothes (Penguin, 2014), Souvenir, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston.

Gulzamira Mambetalieva is a senior English lecturer at Kyrgyz National Balasagyn University in Bishkek. An active translator of Kyrgyz, Russian, and English literature, she is the author of A Path from the Village (Bishkek Press, 2012) and Glossary of Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Terms and Interpretations: Essays and Extracts (Bishkek Press, 2013), and the compiler of Munur Mambetaliev: Honest as the Spirit (Uluu Toolor Press, 2015), the collected poems of Munur Mambetaliev.