Translators

Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese writer and translator based in New York. She translates from Chinese, French, and Spanish. Her translations and essays have appeared in Restless Books, AAWW, WLT, Catapult, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She is a selected translator for the 2021 ALTA Emerging Translators Mentorship program with a focus on Taiwanese prose.

Photo by Mario Pardo Segovia

Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, archivist, and editor.

Dominic Thomas is Madeleine L. Letessier Professor and chair of the Department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. He is the author or co-author of numerous books including Black France (2007), Africa and France (2013), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution (2014), The Invention of Race (2014), and Vers la guerre des identités (2016). He is the editor of the Global African Voices series at Indiana University Press.

Tim Thomas is a musical writer, actor, and photographer. He lives in London.

Max Thompson is an MFA student of translation at the University of Arkansas. His work has appeared previously in The Alchemy Journal of Translation and Unsplendid.

Vala Thorodds is a translator, poet, publisher, and editor. She received a PEN/Heim grant for her translation of the novel Swanfolk, by Kristín Ómarsdóttir, published in the US and the UK in 2022, and her translation of Forevernoon, by Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir, was recently named a Guardian poetry book of the month. Her work has appeared in publications including Granta, the White Review, and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem.

Spencer Thurlow is the current Poet Laureate of West Tisbury, Massachusetts. His poetry or translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, Cincinnati Review, Comstock Review, Worcester Review, and others. He is co-translator of Sonic Peace, by Kiriu Minashita.

Valeria Tsygankova is currently doing graduate work in the history of the book at the University of London. In 2011 she graduated with a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where she edited two undergraduate literary magazines and wrote an honors thesis on the publication history of the Bishops' Bible (1568). She is especially interested in contemporary poetry and poetics, twentieth-century Russian writers, translation, and book history.

Jim Tucker’s translations include some thirty-five essays by George Konrád, in addition to works by numerous other authors. Tucker lives in Budapest.

Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018) and the translator of several books of contemporary francophone poetry and philosophy. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. 

Nita Tyndall is a queer author and translator from North Carolina. While they’ve been writing for a while, they only recently discovered their love of translating. Their first novel, Who I Was with Her, will be published by HarperTeen in fall 2020.

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.