Translators

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.

Sholeh Wolpé is a recipient of the PEN/Heim Translation award and the Lois Roth Persian Translation prize as well as the author of three verse collections and two books of translations.

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.

Michelle Yeh received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California. She has written extensively on modern poetry in the Chinese language from China and Taiwan from the early twentieth century to the present and has translated Chinese literature of all genres. She is a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, of which she also serves as chair, at the University of California, Davis.

Hitomi Yoshio (b. 1979) is an associate professor of Global Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies at Waseda University. She specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese literature with a focus on women’s writing. Her translations of Mieko Kawakami’s works have appeared in various literary journals and The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories.

Daisy Zamora’s poetry collections in Spanish have been published in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Spain. Most recently, her selected poems were published in Madrid: La violenta espuma (Visor, 2017). Bilingual collections of her work have been published in England and the US, including The Violent Foam, translated by George Evans.

Rouhollah Zarei is an assistant professor of English, Yasouj University, Iran. He is the author of Edgar Allan Poe: An Archetypal Reading and co-authored The Unsaid: Nature and Nostalgia in the Poetry of Nader Naderpour (forthcoming).

Zhou Xiaojing is a professor of English at University of the Pacific. Her translations of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poems appeared in Chinese Literature Today and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.

Ping Zhu is an associate professor of Chinese literature at the University of Oklahoma and serves as the acting editor in chief of Chinese Literature Today.

Linda Stern Zisquit has published six collections of poetry and several volumes of translations from Hebrew poetry, including Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach, for which she received an NEA Translation Award and was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Award. For many years she was poetry coordinator for the Shaindy Rudoff Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.

Jennifer Zoble is a writer, editor, educator, and literary translator. She coedits InTranslation and teaches academic and creative writing at NYU.