Ellen Elias-Bursac
Interim President*, 2021-2023 (previously: President, 2019-2021; Vice-President, 2016-2019)

Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating novels and non-fiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s. She won the National Translation Award for her translation of David Albahari's novel Götz and Meyer in 2006. Her book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War was given the Mary Zirin Prize in 2015.

*Annie Fisher was ALTA Vice-President from 2019-2021, then served six months as President before stepping down in March 2022 after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Chenxin Jiang
Vice-President, 2021-2023 (previously: At-Large, 2020-2021)

Chenxin Jiang translates from Italian, German, and Chinese. Recent translations include Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta (Norton), shortlisted for the 2019 Italian Prose in Translation Award, Volatile Texts: Us Two by Zsuzsanna Gahse (Dalkey Archive), and the PEN/Heim-winning The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin (NYRB). Last year, she was a judge for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. Until recently, she was Senior Editor (Chinese) at Asymptote Journal.

Patrick Blaine
Treasurer, 2018-2024

Patrick Blaine is a Spanish-English fiction translator and Latin American Cultural Studies scholar. His two most recent translations are Dark Echoes of the Past and Angels and Loners, both by Chilean author Ramón Díaz Eterovic (AmazonCrossing). He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington (2010), specializing in post-dictatorial cultural production of the Southern Cone. Blaine has written and translated literary and film criticism (LOM, Duke, LAP). He makes his home in Eugene, Oregon, where he is Dean of Curriculum, Assessment, and Grants Development at Lane Community College.

Samantha Schnee
Secretary, 2017-2023

Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Carmen Boullosa’s latest novel, The Book of Anna, was published by Coffee House Press last year. Her translation of Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014) was shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize. She won the 2015 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation for her work on Boullosa’s El complot de los Románticos. She is a trustee of English PEN, where she chaired the Writers in Translation committee from 2014-17 and is serving her second and final term as secretary of ALTA. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, she lives in Houston, Texas.

Geoffrey Brock
At-Large, 2022-2025

Geoffrey Brock is the author of three books of poems, the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of a dozen books of poetry, prose, and comics, most recently Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Allegria (Archipelago, 2020), which received ALTA’s National Translation Award in poetry. He has also received translation awards from the NEA, the MLA, the PEN Center USA, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry magazine, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing & Translation at the University of Arkansas, where he is the founding editor of the Arkansas International.

Sean Gasper Bye
At-Large, 2020-2023

Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish fiction and literary nonfiction. He is a founding member of the translators' collective Cedilla & Co., former Literature and Humanities Curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York, and was an NEA translation fellow in 2019. He lives in Philadelphia.

Nancy Naomi Carlson
At-Large, 2022-2025 (previously: At-Large, 2019-2022)

Nancy Naomi Carlson, translator and poet, has authored twelve titles (eight translated), including Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull Books, 2021), which won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019), her second full-length poetry collection, was named “New & Noteworthy” by The New York Times. A recipient of two NEA literature translation grants, she was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Poetry Award. Decorated with the French Academic Palms, she is the translation editor for On the Seawall. Carlson has earned two doctorates, including one in foreign language methodology.

Bonnie Chau
At-Large, 2020-2023

Bonnie Chau is a writer and translator from Southern California. She is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood (2018), and her writing has appeared in Flaunt, The Offing, Joyland, Two Lines, Fence, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in fiction with a joint concentration in literary translation from Columbia University, where she has also taught translation. She was a 2017 ALTA Travel fellow, and has also received fellowships and residency support from Kundiman, Art Farm Nebraska, Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony. She is currently a Fall 2020 Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.

Bruna Dantas Lobato
At-Large, 2021-2024

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a Brazilian writer and translator living between New York and St. Louis. Her translation of Caio Fernando Abreu's Moldy Strawberries (PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant 2019) is forthcoming from Archipelago Books in April 2022, and her translation of Giovana Madalosso’s Tokyo Suite is forthcoming from Europa Editions later in 2022. Her work has also appeared in The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere, and has been recognized with fellowships from Yaddo, A Public Space, NYU, the University of Iowa, and ALTA.

Umair Kazi
At-Large, 2022-2024

Umair Kazi is a lawyer, writer, and translator from Urdu. He currently serves as the Director of Policy & Advocacy for the Authors Guild, and is a principal drafter of the Authors Guild’s Literary Translation Model Contract and Commentary. His translations of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz have appeared in Circumference, Brooklyn Rail’s In Translation, Inventory, Exhanges, adda, and Pleiades.

Aviya Kushner
At-Large, 2022-2025 (previously: At-Large, 2019-2022)

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of WOLF LAMB BOMB (Orison Books, 2021), winner of The Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry and a New & Noteworthy selection by The New York Times, and The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and Sami Rohr Prize Finalist. She is The Forward’s language columnist and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellow in translation, as well as an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Margo Pave
At-Large, 2020-2023

Margo Pave is an independent legal consultant in Washington D.C., providing strategic, legislative, and regulatory analysis; compliance assistance; and litigation services to local and national clients. She has served as counsel to national and local unions and non-profit organizations, advising on administrative, managerial and compliance matters, including statutory and regulatory requirements, constitution and by-laws issues, human resources policies and activities, internal and external audits, and contractual arrangements with service providers and other entities.

Elections are held annually in the summer and are governed by the ALTA bylaws.