Ishaan Anavkar
Ishaan grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and State College, Pennsylvania, and now calls Chicago home. He graduated with undergraduate degrees in History, International Politics, and Geography and a Master’s in Social Sciences. He currently works as the South Asian Cataloging Specialist at UChicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library, cataloging the university’s vast collection of books from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal in over 15 languages. He is interested in taking up a career as a translator in order to translate academic and fiction literature from Hindi and Marathi to English and to bridge the gaps in intellectual conversation that may hindered by linguistic barriers.
Izidora Angel
Izidora Angel is a Bulgarian-born writer, translator and curator living in Chicago. She has published essays, critique and translations for the Chicago Reader, Publishing Perspectives, EuropeNow Journal, Drunken Boat (Anomaly), Banitza, Egoist, and others. Her full-length translation of Hristo Karastoyanov’s “The Same Night Awaits Us All”, for which she received an English PEN grant and a fellowship at ART OMI, is out now from Open Letter Books.
Winifred Bird
Winifred Bird is an editor at Tuttle Publishing, a publisher of books about Asia including fiction in translation from Japan and elsewhere. Previously she worked as a translator of young adult and popular contemporary fiction from Japan, and as an environmental journalist in Japan. She has translated work by Tomihiko Morimi, Shuzo Oshimi, and Nishioishin and is the author of Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods with a Guide to Plants and Recipes (Stone Bridge Press). She is a recipient of awards and grants from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Japan Literature Publishing Project, the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, and the Fund for Environmental Journalism.
Neil Blackadder
Neil Blackadder translates drama and prose from German and French, specializing in contemporary theatre. His translations of plays by Lukas Bärfuss, Ewald Palmetshofer, Rebekka Kricheldorf and Mishka Lavigne have been produced in London, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere, and he has received grants from the NEA, PEN, and the Howard Foundation, and held residencies at the Banff Centre and Art Omi. Neil grew up in England and in 2019 retired from 25 years as a professor of theatre at Duke University and Knox College. He is the Translations Editor for Another Chicago Magazine. In spring 2023, Neil served as Translator in Residence at Princeton University.
Caroline Carter
Caroline Carter is a writer, educator, and Spanish–English translator. She recently graduated from the University of Chicago with honors in Romance Languages and Literatures. She is interested in how gender, sexuality, chronic illness, and language interact in colonial and postcolonial settings.
Amaia Gabantxo
Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, a singer and a literary translator specialized in Basque literature–a pioneer in the field and its most prolific contributor. Forthcoming in 2018 are her translations of Harkaitz Cano’s Twist (Archipelago Books, NY) and Miren Agur Meabe’s A Glass Eye(Parthian, UK). She is a lecturer at the University of Chicago.
Nicole Burgoyne
PhD in Germanic Languages and Literature, Secondary Field in Slavic Literary and Cultural Studies, Harvard University 2016. Assistant Instructional Professor of German at the University of Chicago.
Kevin Gerry Dunn
Kevin Gerry Dunn is a Spanish–English translator specializing in literature, art, gender, and immigration. His recent translations include Countersexual Manifesto by Paul B. Preciado (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Revealing Selves: Transgender Portraits from Argentina by Kike Arnal and Josefina Fernández (The New Press, 2018). He also heads the FTrMP Project, an effort to make Spanish translations of vital migration paperwork available for free online.
Slava Faybysh
Slava Faybysh was born in Ukraine and grew up in the Chicago area. He translates from Russian and Spanish, both of which he studied at Oberlin College. His co-translation (with fellow TCTC member Ellen Vayner) of Ainur Karim’s play Chins Up! Shoulders Back! won the 2022 Plays in Translation Contest, sponsored by the American Literary Translators Association and the Scoundrel and Scamp Theatre. His translation of Elsa Drucaroff’s thriller set in 1970s Argentina, called Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case, was released in 2024, and short translations of his have been published in journals such as the New England Review, the Southern Review, Latin American Literature Today, Another Chicago Magazine, and The Common.
Jason Grunebaum
Jason Grunebaum’s book-length translations from Hindi include Uday Prakash’s The Girl with the Golden Parasol and The Walls of Delhi, and, with Ulrike Stark, Manzoor Ahtesham’s The Tale of the Missing Man, winner of the 2016 Global Humanities Translation Prize. He has been awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and his work has been shortlisted for the DSC Prize in South Asian Literature. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.
Dan Hanrahan
Dan Hanrahan is a musician, translator, poet, performer, and educator. A National Poetry Slam finalist, Dan has performed monologues throughout North America, including at Beyond Baroque in L.A. and New York’s Nuyorican Poets Café. He has written essays for Counterpunch, El Beisman, The Mantle, and OpEdNews, and stage music for Chicago’s Spanish-language theater company Colectivo El Pozo. Dan has also provided the English language super-titles for several of Colectivo’s productions and recently had a feature role in the Spanish-language first film produced by the collective, Cuaco, due to be released in spring of 2020. Dan’s poetry and translations have appeared in the Shepherd Express, Howling Dog, Brilliant Corners, Words Without Borders, salamalandro.net (Brazil) and are forthcoming in Transition. In recent years, Dan began releasing albums of his original songs. Three Waves, made with musicians who’ve played in Sparklehorse, Camper Van Beethoven and Chi Cha Libre, came out in 2015 and features songs in English and Brazilian Portuguese. Radical Songs for Rough Times was released in 2019. It has original protest songs in English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. Good Deed Rain will publish Dan’s first full-length collection of poetry in late 2019. Dan’s music can be found on bandcamp.
Mary Hawley
Mary Hawley is a poet, fiction writer, and translator. Her poetry collection Double Tongues was published by Tia Chucha Press, and her poems and short stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Fifth Wednesday, Easy Street, Notre Dame Review, Mudlark, and The Bloomsbury Review. She translates poetry from Spanish to English, and was the co-translator of the bilingual poetry anthology Astillas de luz/Shards of Light (Tia Chucha Press). Currently she helps coordinate Palabra Pura, the bilingual reading series of the Guild Literary Complex. She is a Goodreads author and a recipient of a 2019 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award.
Kay Heikkinen
Kay Heikkinen has been translating from Arabic since 2010. Her book-length translations include In the Time of Love, by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz; Ben Barka Lane, by Mahmoud Saeed; The Woman from Tantoura, by Radwa Ashour; and Clouds over Alexandria, by Naguib Mahfouz; and Velvet, by Huzama Habayeb (for which she won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2020); Before the Queen Falls Asleep, by Huzama Habyeb (forthcoming); and the Granada trilogy, by Radwa Ashour (forthcoming). She has retired from the University of Chicago and is now based in Seattle.
May Huang
May Huang is a a translator, poet, and essayist. Born in Taiwan and raised in Hong Kong, she translated from Chinese into English. She will graduate from the University of Chicago with honors in English and Comparative Literature in June. She is currently a social media manager for Asymptote.
Thibaut d’Huberat
I was in Paris and grew up in southern France, in the countryside near Toulouse. After high school, I started studying Indian languages (Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit) and Persian in Paris. Now, I teach Bengali and Indo-Persian literature at the University of Chicago. My primary domain of research is the history of literary practices in eastern India and the study of poetics in multilingual contexts. My approach brings together textual criticism, literary hermeneutics, the study of traditional modes of philology, and the performance of poetry in religious and secular settings. I am currently working on various text edition and translation projects that involve premodern Bengali, Persian, and Sanskrit texts.
Annie Janusch
Annie Janusch’s translations include works by Jürgen Goldstein, Wolf Haas, Anja Kampmann, Walter Kappacher, Heinrich von Kleist, and Uwe Tellkamp. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robert Bosch Foundation. Janusch teaches literary translation workshops in the University of Chicago’s creative writing program, where she is fiction editor for Chicago Review.
Chenxin Jiang
Chenxin Jiang’s translations include the PEN/Heim-winning The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin (NYRB) and Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta (Norton), shortlisted for the 2019 Italian Prose in Translation Award. Other authors she has translated include Jan Wagner, Zsuzsanna Gahse, and Jiang Hao.
Kolin Jordan
Kolin is a writer, translator, and co-founder of 7Vientos Press. He has translated works by Rey Andújar, Mario Bellatin, and Héctor Torres among others. He is the intercambio fiction editor for MAKE Magazine and is all around a pretty cool dude.
Denise Kripper
Denise Kripper is a bilingual Spanish-English literary translator and a translation studies scholar. She is also the Translation Editor at Latin American Literature Today. She holds a PhD in Literature and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University and is currently Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Translation Studies at Lake Forest College. She is the author of Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation. https://www.
Aviya Kushner
Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau / Random House), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize. She is The Forward’s language columnist, and has received a Howard Foundation Fellowship and an Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature grant. She is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, and has served as a translation mentor for The National Yiddish Book Center. She translates Hebrew poetry and prose.
Susanna Lang
Susanna Lang’s translations of poetry include Words in Stone by Yves Bonnefoy (University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), Baalbek by Nohad Salameh (L’Atelier du Grand Tétras, 2021), and My Soul Has No Corners by Souad Labbize (Diálogos Books, 2023). Her translations of these and other French poets are published or forthcoming in Delos, The Literary Review, Transference, Another Chicago Magazine, Ezra, Oomph! Journal, and Columbia Journal. Her third full-length collection of original poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was published by Terrapin Books in 2017, and a chapbook, Like This, appeared in 2023 from Unsolicited Books. More information available at www.susannalang.com.
Kristen Renee Miller
Kristen Renee Miller is the publisher at Sarabande Books. An award-winning poet and translator, she is a 2023 NEA Fellow and the translator of two books from the French by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. She is the recipient of honors from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AIGA, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her work can be found widely, including in Poetry, The Nation, and Best New Poets. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Armine Kotin Mortimer
Armine Kotin Mortimer, PhD, held an NEA Translation Fellowship for 2020, and she has been named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques in recognition of her distinguished work on behalf of French culture. The author of numerous scholarly publications, she has published translations of five French books, The Enchanted Clock by Julia Kristeva, Mysterious Mozart and Casanova the Irresistible by Philippe Sollers, An Impossible Love by Christine Angot, and Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death by Julia Kristeva. Excerpts from twenty other literary translations have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Cossack Review, Asymptote, Black Sun Lit, The Peacock Journal, The Critical Flame, The Northwest Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Lunch Ticket, Transference, carte blanche, Another Chicago Magazine, LIT Magazine, Delos, The Massachusetts Review, Apple Valley Review, and AGNI. Armine Kotin Mortimer translates literary fiction and nonfiction from French, with a special focus on contemporary authors.
Kathleen Maris Paltrineri
Kathleen Maris Paltrineri is a poet-translator from Iowa. She is the recipient of a 2021-2022 Fulbright Fellowship to Norway for translation research. Her translation of Norwegian poet Kristin Berget’s and when the light comes it will be so fantastic is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2025. For her own poetry, Paltrineri has received scholarshipsand residencies from USF Verftet, Arctic Circle Residency, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Jentel Artist Residency. Paltrineri’s poems have recently appeared in Bone Bouquet, Bennington Review, and CALYX. Five poetry light projections from her ARCHIPELEGIES series are currently exhibited through 2024 at Neue Galerie Berlin in “Traces,” a group show by artists, writers, and educators. ARCHIPELEGIES explores converging crises—the pandemic and the climate catastrophe—through the mediums of poetry, photography, and light projection. During the year of the Hayman Fire, she was a Rocky Mountain National Park wildland firefighter.
Alta L. Price
Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. She translates from Italian and German into English, and was awarded the Gutekunst Prize for Dea Loher’sBugatti Turns Up. Her translations of work by Dana Grigorcea and Martin Mosebach are forthcoming in 2019, and her recent books includeThe Dynamic Library (Soberscove), Jürgen Holstein’s The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic (Taschen), and Corrado Augias’sThe Secrets of Italy (Rizzoli Ex Libris). Her work has appeared on BBC Radio 4, 3 Quarks Daily, Maharam Stories, Trafika Europe, and Words Without Borders. She is a founding member of Cedilla & Co. and a member of AWP, the PEN Translation Committee, and the American Literary Translators Association. She is currently a regional chapter ambassador for the Authors Guild, serves on the board ofHand Papermaking, Inc., and loves puzzles—translation being her favorite kind.
Sarah A. Rae
Sarah A. Rae’s poems have appeared in a variety of print and online journals, including Burlesque Press, Tata Nacho Press, fieralingue, Solamente en San Miguel, and the bilingual Mexican journal Revista Blanco Y Negro. Her translations of poems from the Spanish by the Oaxacan Mexican poet Guadalupe Ángela can be found in the online journal Ezra. Her chapbook, Someplace Else, is forthcoming in 2020 from dancing girl press. She lives in Chicago.
Amanda Sarasien
Amanda Sarasien is a writer and literary translator working from Portuguese and French into English. A recipient of a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship and past co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee, her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Common, The Literary Review, Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Lucina Schell
Lucina Schell works in international rights for the University of Chicago Press, and is founding editor of Reading in Translation. She translates poetry from the Spanish. She has translated Daiana Henderson’s chapbook ‘So That Something Remains Lit’ (Cardboard House Press, 2018), and the first full-length collection of poetry by Miguel Ángel Bustos in English (co•im•press, 2018).
Matthew Smith
Matthew Smith’s translations include Sleep: Preceded by Saying Poetry by Jacques Roubaud, Seven String Quartets by Frédéric Forte and three novels by the Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint. His translation of conversations between Aimé Césaire and Françoise Vergès is forthcoming from Polity Press. He is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Northern Illinois University.
Maja Teref
Maja Teref translates from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (BCS) with her husband Steven Teref. Their books include Novica Tadić’s Assembly and Ana Ristović’s Directions for Use, the latter shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Best Translated Book Award, and the National Translation Award. Their translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Aufgabe, Asymptote, and elsewhere. They are currently translating the Croatian avant-garde writer Branko Ve Poljanski. Maja is a past president of Illinois TESOL. She teaches English at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where she is also the faculty advisor for Oroboros Review, a student-run literary translation journal.
Steven Teref
Steven Teref translates from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian with his wife Maja Teref. Their books include Novica Tadić’s Assembly and Ana Ristović’s Directions for Use, the latter shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Best Translated Book Award, and the National Translation Award. Their translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Aufgabe, Conduit, and elsewhere. They are currently translating the Serbo-Croatian avant-garde writers Branko Ve Poljanski and MID (Mita Dimitrijevic). Steven is Co-Chief Copy Editor for Asymptote. He is also coediting an anthology on Zenithism, a 1920s avant-garde movement unique to Croatia and Serbia.
Ellen Vayner
I’m a freelance literary translator, Russian English. My recent publications include co-translating Yevgeniy Fiks’s Mother Tongue and Levan Berdzenishvili’s Sacred Darkness: The Last Days of the Gulag (both are available on Amazon). Now I am working on Dmitry Bykov’s collection of short stories. Being a translator is my second career in the US. After emigrating with my parents from Russia, I received a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry and worked as a research scientist and adjunct professor. But then my life-long passion for languages and literature made me consider a career change. In my translation-free time I enjoy reading, listening to classical music, and walking my adorable Airedale Rudy in the beautiful parks of Shaker Heights, my hometown.