2023 ALTA Travel Fellows

Mayada Ibrahim, 2023 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow (Arabic)
Mayada Ibrahim is a translator, editor, and writer based in Queens, New York, with roots in Khartoum and London. She works in Arabic and English. Her translations have been published by Archipelago Books, Circumference, Banipal, and Willows House. She participated as a judge in PEN America’s Literary Translation Prize 2022. Learn more about Mayada here.

Rachel Landau, 2023 Travel Fellow (Russian)
Rachel Landau is a poet and translator from Boston, Massachusetts. She is an assistant poetry editor at Asymptote Journal, and she has received support from the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. Currently, Rachel is a PhD student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Learn more about Rachel here. 

Ye Odelia Lu, 2023 Travel Fellow (Mandarin/Taiwanese Mandarin)
Ye Odelia Lu is an essayist and translator with an MFA degree from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Sine Theta Magazine, Columbia Journal, The Margins, and Epiphany Magazine. Lu will be teaching at Duke Kunshan University and Wellesley College next year. She enjoys cooking and gaming in her free time. Learn more about Odelia here.

Dawid Mobolaji, 2023 Travel Fellow (Polish)
Dawid Mobolaji is a Polish-Nigerian literary translator, writer and medical doctor based in London. Born and raised in West Pomerania, he works between English and his native Polish. He recently took part in the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, UK. Learn more about Dawid here. 

Allana Noyes, 2023 Travel Fellow (Spanish)
Allana Noyes is a literary translator from Reno, Nevada. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and won the 2018 World Literature Today Student Translation Prize in poetry. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and the Bread Loaf Translator’s Conference. She can be found at allananoyes.com. Learn more about Allana here.

2023 Travel Fellow Finalists
Hazel Evans
Bella Hubble
Addie Leak
Cynthia Shin
Tricia Viveros

2022 virtual ALTA Travel Fellows

The 2022 Virtual Travel Fellows were celebrated with a reading held virtually on Tuesday, September 20. Watch the recording here. 

Jasmine Alexander-Greene, 2022 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Virtual Travel Fellow (Russian)
Jasmine Alexander-Greene is a Russian-English translator. She enjoys tackling microfiction, nonfiction of all lengths, short stories, experimental fiction, and comics. Her work has appeared in The Arkansas International. She holds an MA in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies from Stanford University. Learn more about Jasmine here.

Soleil Davíd, 2022 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Virtual Travel Fellow (Filipino/Tagalog)
Soleil Davíd is a poet, writer, and translator from the Philippines. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Two Lines and Ulirát: The Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines. She has received support from PEN America, VONA, and Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. She is a senior editor at The Margins. Learn more about Soleil here.

Michele Bantz, 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow (Spanish, Portuguese)
Michele Bantz is an ATA-certified translator of Spanish and Portuguese. She was awarded the 2021 Granum Foundation Translation Prize for her work-in-progress translation of O Fogo Será a Tua Casa by contemporary Portuguese novelist Nuno Camarneiro. She holds an MA in Translation (Spanish-English) from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) at Monterey and attended the Middlebury Portuguese Language School. Learn more about Michele here.

Yana Ellis, 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow (German, Bulgarian)
Yana Ellis is a Bulgarian-born freelance translator and Modern foreign languages teacher based in the UK. She holds an MA in Translation from the University of Bristol. She translates from German and Bulgarian into English and is drawn to narratives that explore issues of identity, immigration, and the representation of the ‘other’. Learn more about Yana here.

Salma Harland, 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow (Arabic, English)
Salma Harland is an Egyptian translator based in England. She is passionate about translating key texts from pre-Nahda and (post)modern Arabic poetry that have been forgotten or understated in English. Her translations have appeared in the British National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translators Anthology (2022) and in literary journals/magazines. Learn more about Salma here.

Michelle Mirabella, 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow (Spanish)
Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish to English translator whose work appears in The Arkansas International, World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, Firmament, and elsewhere. A finalist in Columbia Journal’s 2022 Spring Contest, she is an alumna of the Middlebury Institute and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Learn more about Michelle here.

Nidhi Singh, 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow (Hindi)
Nidhi Singh is a translator of Hindi poetry. She holds an MA in English from Delhi University and is currently a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and her translation has appeared in World Literature Today. Learn more about Nidhi here.

Suzana Vuljevic, 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow (Albanian and Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian)
Suzana Vuljevic is a historian, writer, and translator who works from Albanian and Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. Suzana holds a Ph.D. in History and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her writing and translations have appeared in AGNI, Asymptote, Eurozine, Exchanges, and elsewhere. Learn more about Suzana here.

Rebecca Weingart, 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow (Yiddish)
Rebecca Weingart is a PhD student in comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her translation of poems by Roshelle Weprinsky was supported by the Yiddish Book Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing and has work published in NonBinary Review, So It Goes, and Pakn Treger. Learn more about Rebecca here.

Hongyu Jasmine Zhu (朱弘昱), 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow (Chinese, English, Latin)
Hongyu Jasmine Zhu (朱弘昱) hails from Chengdu, China, and is a high school student at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania. She grows up surrounded by the beautiful, messy sounds of her mother tongue. In 2022 spring, she adapted her English translation of Sanmao(三毛)’s short story “吹兵” into an 8-minute monologue, and performed it at her high school’s annual Declamation. Learn more about Hongyu Jasmine here.

2022 Virtual Travel Fellow Finalists
Thomas Mira y Lopez
Allana Noyes
Grace Sewell

2021 virtual ALTA Travel Fellows

The 2021 Virtual Travel Fellows were celebrated with a reading held virtually on Saturday, October 17. Watch the recording here.

Fatemeh Madani Sarbarani, 2021 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Virtual Travel Fellow (Persian)
Fatemeh Madani Sarbarani is an Iranian translator and playwright. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance of the Americas from Arizona State University. She translated two Argentinian plays The Walls and Antigona Furiosa by Geiselda Gambaro and an Iraqi play Baghdad Bathhouse by Jawad Al-Asadi into Persian. Moreover, she translated an Iranian play Tomb Dwellers by Hossein Kiyani into English as a part of her PhD dissertation. Learn more about Fatemeh here.

Anushka Sen, 2021 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Virtual Travel Fellow (Bengali)
Anushka is an Indian international PhD candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington. She studies animal presence and spatial dynamics in modernist literature and translates from Bengali, her native language. She is most drawn to the minutiae and cadences of poetry but has recently ventured into the wide-open field of fiction. Learn more about Anushka here.

Michelle Kyoko Crowson, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Japanese)
Michelle Kyoko Crowson is a Japanese American writer and translator based out of the Pacific Northwest. She was awarded the 2019 Kyoko Selden Memorial Prize for her manuscript translation of Akiko Akazome’s Akutagawa Award-winning novel, The Maiden’s Betrayal. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Learn more about Michelle here.

Christine Gutman, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (French)
Paris-based translator Christine Gutman holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She translates primarily from French to English and occasionally from German and Yiddish. Her first book-length literary translation, Papers by Violaine Schwartz, will be published by Fern Books in 2022. Learn more about Christine here.

Lara Norgaard, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish)
Lara Norgaard is an essayist and translator of Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish into English. Her work has appeared in publications including Asymptote Journal, Public Books, The Jakarta Post, and Cuíer (Two Lines Press), and she is a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Grant recipient. Currently, she is a PhD student in comparative literature at Harvard University researching post-dictatorship literatures. Learn more about Lara here.

Calvin Olsen, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Portuguese)
Calvin Olsen is a poet and translator based in Scotland. He holds an MFA from Boston University and is currently a PhD student in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at NC State University. His work has appeared in AGNI, Asymptote, The London Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and many others. Learn more about Calvin here.

Marielle Sutherland, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (German)
Marielle Sutherland is a freelance German-English translator and former lecturer in German Studies. She has a PhD in German and a Diploma in Translation. She has published a co-translation of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke with OUP, translations in the literary journals InTranslation and Alchemy, and contributions in non-fiction books in the arts and humanities. Learn more about Marielle here.

Yilin Wang, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Mandarin Chinese)
Yilin Wang (she/they) is a writer, editor, and Chinese-English translator. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Samovar, Pathlight, China Channel, and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives (Tor). Their writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy, and Words Without Borders, and been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Learn more about Yilin here.

Candice Whitney, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Italian)
Candice Whitney is a writer and international education professional, based in New Jersey. She has been an invited speaker an curator of events about literature and Blackness in Italy at universities. Learn more about Candice here.

Anam Zafar, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Arabic, French)
Anam Zafar translates from Arabic and French so that misrepresented communities can tell their own stories on their own terms. In 2021, she was an Emerging Translators Mentee and translator in residence with the National Centre for Writing in the UK. She volunteers for World Kid Lit and is trained to lead creative translation workshops for young people. Learn more about Anam here.

2021 Virtual Travel Fellow Finalists
Barbara Ofosu-Somuah 
Christina Ng
Jennifer Shyue
Kaylee Lockett
Kaylen Baker

2020 virtual ALTA Travel Fellows

The 2020 Virtual Travel Fellows were celebrated with a downloadable audio chapbooks. Follow this link to listen to their readings and find a transcript. 

Karen Hung Curtis, 2020 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Fellow (Hong Kong Chinese)
Karen Hung Curtis is a Hong Kong writer and translator. She was the recipient of a Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry and Translation Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 2019, and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is translating Hong Kong author Wong Bik-wan. Learn more about Karen here.

Dong Li, 2020 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Fellow (Mandarin Chinese)
Dong Li is an English-language poet and translates from Chinese, English and German. He’s the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and fellowships from Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Yaddo and elsewhere. His full-length translation of the Chinese poet Zhu Zhu The Wild Great Wall was published by Phoneme Media. Learn more about Dong here.

Shoshana Akabas, 2020 Virtual Travel Fellow (Hebrew)
Shoshana Akabas is a New York City based writer, translator, and teacher. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she taught for several years. Her writing and translations can be found in The Washington Post, The Kenyon Review, Asymptote, DoubleSpeak, The Believer, Electric Literature, and Elle Magazine, among others. Learn more about Shoshana here.

Alex Karsavin, 2020 Virtual Travel Fellow (Russian)
Alex Karsavin is a translator and writer based in Chicago. They are the translations & poetry editor at H​​omintern magazine​, and occasionally the ​​Zahir Review​.​ Their writing and translations have appeared in ​​The New Inquiry, ​​Columbia Journal, PenAmerica, Sreda, Sick Muse, and are forthcoming in “F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry” (Isolari Press). They are currently co-translating Ilya Danishevsky's Mannelig in Chains with Anne Fisher, funded by the University of Exeters’ RusTrans project. Learn more about Alex here.

Jamie Lauer, 2020 Virtual Travel Fellow (Spanish)
Jamie Lauer is a Spanish–English translator and freelance editor committed to bringing more female voices from Latin America into translation. She holds an MA in comparative literature and a certificate in literary translation from Indiana University Bloomington, and she was awarded World Literature Today’s 2020 Student Translation Prize for Prose. Learn more about Jamie here.

Kristen Renee Miller, 2020 Virtual Travel Fellow (French)
Kristen Renee Miller’s work appears in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, Guernica and Best New Poets 2018. She is the translator of SPAWN, by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. A recipient of honors from The Kennedy Center, The Humana Festival, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is the managing editor for Sarabande. Learn more about Kristen here.

Laura Nagle, 2020 Virtual Travel Fellow (French, Irish, Spanish)
Laura Nagle is a freelance translator and writer based in Indianapolis. She holds an MA in Romance languages from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently translating Prosper Mérimée’s genre-defying 1827 hoax La Guzla from the French and working on her first novel. Learn more about Laura here.

Ena Selimović, 2020 Virtual Travel Fellow (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian)
Ena Selimović is a literary translator working from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian into English. She is currently translating the novel Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research on multilingualism brings a relational approach to the study of contemporary American and Southeast European literatures. Learn more about Ena here.

Öykü Tekten, 2020 Virtual Travel Fellow (Turkish)
Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, and editor living between Granada and New York. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo, an art and publishing experience with a particular focus on work in and about translation, and a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Learn more about Öykü here.

2020 Virtual ALTA Travel Fellows Finalists
Layla Benitez-James
Maria Garcia
Anna Prawdzik Hull
Mia Spangenberg

2019 ALTA Travel Fellows

Salazar Monárrez, 2019 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow (Spanish and ASL)
From Mexico by way of California, Salazar Monárrez is a UChicago trained linguist in her final year of a Literary Translation MFA from Queens College. She is currently translating Viento en las montañas by Javier Ortega Urquidi, and endeavouring to develop methodology for literary translation of American Sign Language Poetry. Learn more about Salazar here.

Maia Evrona, 2019 ALTA Travel Fellow (Yiddish and Spanish)
Maia Evrona is a poet, prose writer and translator of Yiddish poetry. Her translations of Avrom Sutzkever and Yoysef Kerler have been awarded fellowships from the NEA and the Yiddish Book Center. Her own poetry has been supported with a Fulbright Scholar Award to Spain and Greece. Learn more about Maia here.

Caroline Grace Froh, 2019 ALTA Travel Fellow (German)
Caroline Froh holds a BA in English and German literature from Grinnell College. She is currently an MFA candidate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa, where she is translating works by Jenish-Swiss writer Mariella Mehr. She was the recipient of a 2019 Stanley Travel Fellowship to research and translate Mehr’s work in the national library in Bern, Switzerland. Learn more about Caroline here.

Anni Liu, 2019 ALTA Travel Fellow (Mandarin)
Anni Liu is a writer, translator, and editor with work published or forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Waxwing, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Undocupoets Fellowship and a Katherine Bakeless Nason Scholarship. She holds an MFA from Indiana University and works at Graywolf Press. Learn more about Anni here.

Gnaomi Siemens, 2019 ALTA Travel Fellow (Old English, Old Scots, and Sumerian)
Gnaomi Siemens holds an MFA from Columbia University School of The Arts, in poetry and literary translation. Her words can be found at Asymptote, Words Without Borders, The Believer, Slice Magazine, Europe Now Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, and American Chordata, among others. She lives in New York City. Learn more about Gnaomi here.

2019 ALTA Travel Fellowship Finalists

Layla Benitez-James
Nerina Cocchi
Hilah Kohen
May Huang
Sanna Waern

2018 ALTA TRAVEL FELLOWS

Mariam Rahmani, 2018 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow (Persian)
Mariam Rahmani writes fiction and non-fiction and also works on translation. Her current projects include a novel-in-progress and a translation from Persian/Farsi into English of Mahsa Mohebali’s Don’t Worry (2008), for which she was awarded a PEN/Heim translation grant in 2018. Learn more about Mariam here.

Elina Alter, 2018 ALTA Travel Fellow (Russian and German)
Elina Alter’s recent work appears in BOMB, The New England Review, The Paris Review Daily, Modern Poetry in Translation, Slice, and Guernica. She is the recipient of fellowships from ALTA, VIDA, and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, and the editor of Circumference, a journal of poetry in translation. Learn more about Elina here.

Lizzie Buehler, 2018 ALTA Travel Fellow (Korean)
Lizzie Buehler is a first-year MFA student in literary translation at the University of Iowa. Her translation from Korean of Table for One, by Yun Ko Eun, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Learn more about Lizzie here.

Aaron Robertson, 2018 ALTA Travel Fellow (Italian)
Aaron Robertson is a Detroit-born journalist and translator. He has written for The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point Magazine, and more. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s novel Beyond Babylon is forthcoming from Two Lines Press. He holds a MSt in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. Learn more about Aaron here.

Brian Sneeden, 2018 ALTA Travel Fellow (Greek)
Brian Sneeden is the author of the poetry collection Last City (Carnegie Mellon, 2018). His translation of Phoebe Giannisi’s Homerica (World Poetry Books, 2017) was selected by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017. A 2018 PEN/Heim recipient, Brian is a PhD student in poetry and translation studies at the University of Connecticut. Learn more about Brian here.

Maggie Zebracka, 2018 ALTA Travel Fellow (Polish)
Born in southeastern Poland, Maggie Zebracka received her BA from Wellesley College and her MFA from Vanderbilt University. She is currently an MFA student in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa where she is translating Joanna Bator’s 2014 novel, Dark, Almost Night (Ciemno, Prawie Noc), from the Polish. Her translations appear in The Arkansas International, Asymptote, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Drunken Boat. Learn more about Maggie here.

2018 ALTA Travel Fellowship Finalists

Kaveh Bassiri
Jasmine Bailey
Hope Campbell Gustafon
Isabella Livorni

2017 ALTA TRAVEL FELLOWS

Aaron Coleman, 2017 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow (Spanish)
Aaron Coleman is the author of St. Trigger, which won the 2015 Button Poetry Prize, and Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018). A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow, Aaron is currently a PhD student in Washington University in St. Louis’ Comparative Literature Program’s International Writers Track. Read more about Aaron here.

Bonnie Chau, 2017 ALTA Travel Fellow (Chinese and French)
Bonnie Chau has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, with a concentration in translation, focusing on Chinese and French fiction. Her writing has appeared in Flaunt, Timber, Drunken Boat, Queen Mob’s Tea House, and other journals. A Kundiman fellow, she currently works at Poets & Writers in New York City. Read more about Bonnie here.

Ellen Jones, 2017 ALTA Travel Fellow (Spanish)
Ellen Jones is Criticism Editor at Asymptote and a doctoral researcher at Queen Mary University of London. Her translations from Spanish into English have appeared or are forthcoming in the Guardian, Hotel, Palabras errantes, and Columbia Journal, and in Enrique Winter’s bilingual chapbook Suns (Cardboard House Press, 2017). Read more about Ellen here.

Zoë Sandford, 2017 ALTA Travel Fellow (Arabic and French)
Zoë Sandford was born in the US and moved to the UK at the age of eight. She holds a BA in French and Arabic from St John’s College, Oxford. Her original writing has appeared in The ISIS and Vulture. Read more about Zoë here.

Timea Balogh, 2017 ALTA Travel Fellow (Hungarian)
Timea Balogh is a Hungarian-American translator and writer currently earning her MFA in Fiction at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her translation has appeared at The Short Story Project. She is in the process of translating Ilka Papp-Zakor’s short story collection and 2015 JAK Kendő Award winner, Angel Dinner. Read more about Timea here.

David Smith, 2017 ALTA Travel Fellow (Norwegian)
David M. Smith is an Atlanta-based translator of Norwegian fiction. He holds a Master’s Degree in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. His work has appeared in Drunken Boat. Read more about David here.

2017 ALTA Travel Fellowship Finalists

Aviva Kana
Alicia Meier
Emma Rault
Dayla Rogers
Skye Savage 

2016 ALTA Travel Fellows

Bruna Dantas Lobato, 2016 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow (Brazilian Portuguese)
Bruna Dantas Lobato’s writings and translations have appeared in BOMB, Ploughshares online, The Millions, Words without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She is the Fiction Editor of Washington Square Review and an MFA candidate in Fiction at New York University, where she teaches creative writing. She is originally from Natal, Brazil. Read more about Bruna here.

Monika Cassel (German)
Monika Cassel is a translator, poet, and educator. Her translations have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, and Asymptote; her forthcoming chapbook won the 2015 Venture Poetry Award. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Michigan and teaches German at Oregon State University. Read more about Monika here.

Nicholas Glastonbury (Turkish)
Nicholas Glastonbury is a translator and writer based in Brooklyn. He is a PhD student in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and is also a co-editor of the Turkey Page for the e-zine Jadaliyya. Read more about Nicholas here.

Haider Shahbaz (Urdu)
Haider Shahbaz has a B.A. from Yale University and an MFA from University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His translations have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Portland Review, Aldus, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Starting in October, he will be the Charles Pick Fellow at University of East Anglia. Read more about Haider here.

Kelsi Vanada (Spanish)
Kelsi Vanada is pursuing an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa and holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2016). She writes poems, and translates poetry from Spanish and the Scandinavian languages. She won Asymptote’s 2016 Close Approximations Translation Contest. Recent work at Asymptote, New Delta Review, and Prelude. Read more about Kelsi here.

2016 ALTA Travel Fellowship Finalists

Mario Ariza
Bonnie Chau
Karla Comanda
Ellen Jones
Stiliana Milkova

2015 ALTA Travel Fellows

Claire Eder (French)
Claire Eder’s poems and translations have recently appeared in [PANK], Midwestern Gothic, The Common, and Guernica. She received her MFA from the University of Florida and is currently pursuing a PhD in poetry at Ohio University, where she serves as an editor of Quarter After Eight literary magazine. Read more about Claire here.

Anne Greeott (Italian & Spanish)
Anne Greeott’s translations have appeared in Bitter Oleander, Journal of Italian Translation, Italian Poetry Review, Atticus Review, World Literature Today and are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest and Gradiva. In 2014 she was awarded a Fulbright Grant to Italy to research and translate the poetry of Mario Luzi. Read more about Anne here. Read more about Anne here.

Audrey Hall (Spanish)
Audrey Hall has translated various short stories, children’s books, scholarly articles, and historical texts from Spanish into English, as well as several as-yet-unpublished novels and collections of stories by Argentine women authors. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and received a Fulbright Study/Research Grant for literary translation in 2014. Read more about Audrey here.

Christiana Hills (French)
Christiana Hills is an award-winning translator from French. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Translation Studies at Binghamton University. She is also a regular contributor to Intralingo, a translation blog. Her translation of Oulipo member Michèle Audin’s One Hundred Twenty-One Days is forthcoming from Deep Vellum in 2016. Read more about Christiana here.

Canaan Morse (Chinese)
Canaan Morse is a translator, editor, and poet. He is a member of Paper Republic, and co-founding editor of Pathlight: New Chinese Writing. His translation of The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei, won the 2014 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation and is forthcoming with New York Review of Books. Read more about Canaan here.

2015 ALTA Travel Fellowship Finalists

Olaya Barr
Sam Bett
Tul'si Bhambry
Bonnie Chau
Jeff Clingenpeel
Elisabeth Jaquette
Megan Matich
Derick Mattern
Maria Nazos
Margaret Ross
Jessica Sequeira
David Smith
Allen Young
Jeffrey Zuckerman

2014 alta travel fellows

Megan Berkobien (Catalan)
Megan Berkobien is pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She worked as an assistant editor for Asymptote, among other editorial projects. Her translations have been featured in Words Without Borders, Palabras Errantes, and Asymptote, to name a few. She attempts to theorize new publishing forms.

Tenzin Dickie (Tibetan)
Tenzin Dickie is a writer and a translator in NYC. She is Editor of Treasury of Lives, a biographical encyclopedia of figures from Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayas. She is also an editor of Tibetan Political Review and English Editor of Tibet Web Digest. She is a graduate of Harvard and Columbia universities.

Alice Guthrie (Arabic)
Born in London and raised in rural Norfolk, UK, Alice Guthrie has been studying Arabic formally and informally since 1997, most notably at Exeter University and l’Institut Français d’Etudes Arabes de Damas (now IFPO). In her translations of contemporary Arabic literature she focuses on work written in spoken dialect – an emerging radical art form.

Sara Novic (Bosnian/Croatian)
Sara Novic is a recent graduate from the MFA program at Columbia University, where she studied fiction and translation. Her translations have been published by Circumference, and she is the winner of the 2014 Barnstone Literary Translation Prize. Her first novel, about the Yugoslav Civil War, will be released by Random House in 2015.

Christopher Tamigi (Italian)
Chris Tamigi is a third-year student in the University of Arkansas’ MFA program in literary translation.  He primarily translates contemporary and twentieth-century Italian fiction.

Annie Tucker (Bahasa Indonesia)
Annie Tucker is a writer, translator, and educator. Her translation of Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan’s novel Beauty is a Wound has been recognized by a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, among others, and is forthcoming with New Directions  Books in 2015. She received her PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA in 2013.

2014 ALTA Travel Fellowship Finalists

Genevieve Hartnett Goldstein
Kathleen Heil 
Nicole Idar
Dong Li
Tanya Paperny
Kristina Reardon

2013 alta travel fellows

Adam Z. Levy is a writer and translator based in New York. He received an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University, where he was also a teaching fellow. He spent the 2012-2013 academic year in Budapest on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation, and has completed most recently a translation of Gabor Schein’s The Book of Mordechai from the Hungarian. His essays and reviews have appeared in The American Reader, World Literature Today, The Millions, and the L.A. Review of Books.

Meghan Flaherty is an MFA Candidate at Columbia University in Nonfiction and Literary Translation. She writes memoir, translates poetry and prose from Spanish, and is currently working on a book-length personal history of Argentine tango. Her translations of Alfonsina Storni have recently been published in Alchemy. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Printed, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The New Inquiry, and The Iowa Review.

Andrew Barrett is a translator and musician living in Detroit, Michigan. He translates poetry and literature from Ancient Greek, Modern Greek and Latin. He is currently working on translations of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca – an expansive Ancient Greek epic from late Antiquity – and the Ancient Greek alchemical texts of Zosimus of Panopolis, Cleopatra the Alchemist and Stephen of Alexandria. Excerpts from his translation of the Dionysiaca have appeared in Aldus, a Journal of Translation and Anomalous Press. His translations of the Modern Greek poets Christopher Kontonikolis and Harris Psarras have appeared in Words without Borders, Aldus, a Journal of Translation and Tellus. In the summer of 2011, he was a resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Andrew holds an MA in literary translation studies from the University of Rochester and an MA and BA in classics from Wayne State University, where he currently teaches classical mythology.

Emma Ramadan studied Comparative Literature and Literary Translation at Brown University, and is now pursuing a Masters in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris. Her undergraduate thesis, a translation of Anna Parian’s Monospace, is forthcoming from La Presse, and her translation of Anne F. Garreta’s Sphinx is forthcoming from Deep Vellum. She is also currently translating Frederic Forte’s 33 sonnets plats. Her writing has appeared in Aldus, Bluestem, and Gigantic Sequins.

Matthew Lundin is a Turkish and Arabic translator from San Antonio, Texas. He lives in Brooklyn where he works as a French and Arabic teacher and does international marketing for an education company. Matthew recently finished his first novel, Gurbet’ten Sonra, which is a playful take on the Arabic Maqamat genre, using allusions and references to Near Eastern literature to narrate the story of a Westerner who has returned from his “gurbet” in the East. He is also finishing work on a translation of Gavur Mahallesi, a collection of short stories by the Armenian/Turkish writer Migirdic Margosyn which deals with the interaction between different language and faith communities living in the “non-believer” district of Diyarbakir in the early 20th century.

2012 alta travel fellows

Alexandra Berlina was born in Moscow. She lives in Germany, where she teaches American literature at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She has two degrees in literature (soon to be joined by a PhD) and a son (soon to be joined by a daughter). Her doctoral thesis deals with Joseph Brodsky’s self-translations; she also published articles on sociocultural aspects of translation. Apart from her teaching, she works as a freelance translator and interpreter. Her greatest passion is poetry translation. Her Russian, German and English “Nachdichtungen” (a pretty German word for recreated verses) have appeared in several magazines; her versions of Brodsky’s poems, one of which received the 2012 Barnstone Translation Prize, eagerly dream of turning into a book.

Joshua Daniel Edwin studied poetry and literary translation at Columbia University, where he is currently a teaching fellow. His poetry haunts the internet courtesy of The Adirondack Review, Avatar Review, and Feathertale. His translations of Dagmara Kraus’ poetry have appeared online with Anomalous Press and were awarded a PEN Translation Fund grant in 2012. He is a member of the editorial board for the magazine Circumference: Poetry in Translation, which you can visit at circumferencemag.org.

Janet Ha was born in Chicago, Illinois, while her parents were graduate students in the city. When she was three years old, she moved with her parents to Seoul, Korea, where she lived until returning to the United States for her college education. After double-majoring in classical studies and English literature at Amherst College, she worked for a year at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters and for two years at its Boston office as an Account Strategist. She left Google to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing at Indiana University Bloomington. Recently, she received the Booth Tarkington Fellowship in Creative Writing for her MFA thesis project. Now in her third year at the program, she is working on her first collection of short stories. She began translating literature after enrolling in a workshop taught by Professor Bill Johnston, a Polish language literary translator, at Indiana University. She is currently translating various short stories by Korean author Park Minkyu.

Hai-Dang Phan is a poet, translator, and Assistant Professor of English at Grinnell College. He received his Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writing his dissertation on literature and reconciliation after the Vietnam War. Phan translates contemporary Vietnamese poetry and his translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Anomalous, Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, and RHINO. His current translation project is a book-length selection of work by Vietnamese poet Phan Nhiên Hạo. An M.F.A. candidate in poetry at the University of Florida, his own poems (in English) have recently been published or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Lana Turner, DIAGRAM, and other literary journals.

Claire Van Winkle received her bachelor’s degree from New York University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College of the City University of New York. She is also at present working with the New York State Psychiatric Institute to explore the writing workshop as an element of therapy. Her recent creative work includes the translation of Jean Blanquet’s Dieu Est Un Arbre Peuplé De Chats. Claire Van Winkle is a poetry editor for the Ozone Park Journal. Claire’s work has been honored with the Lenore Lipstein Memorial Poetry Award, a Hunter College Memoir Prize, the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She currently teaches creative writing at Queens College. She has lived in Paris, Mexico City, and a dozen or so addresses scattered throughout the boroughs of New York. Claire is now a resident of Rockaway Park, Queens.

2011 alta travel fellows

Nora Delaney is a Dutch-English translator based in Boston. She works in the writing program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is also a doctoral candidate at Boston University’s Editorial Institute, writing a dissertation on the 20th-century English-Welsh poet David Jones. Nora translates contemporary Dutch poetry and fiction. She is particularly interested in the work of poets Remco Campert, Eva Gerlach, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Gerrit Komrij, and Martinus Nijhoff, as well as fiction writers Hella S. Haasse and Harry Mulisch and memoirist Boudewijn Büch. Her translations of these writers’ poems and short stories have appeared in Literary Imagination, Two Lines Online, Absinthe: New European Writing, Subtropics, andPusteblume, among other publications. In addition to having served as a contributing editor to Pusteblume and the Boston Translation blog, Nora has had her own poems (in English) and literary critical essays published in Little Star, Fulcrum, The Critical Flame, The Arts Fuse and other publications.

Tara FitzGerald is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and Literary Translation at Columbia University. She moved to New York in 2010 after six years living and working in Mexico City as a freelance travel, lifestyle, and culture writer. Previous to her Mexican sojourn, she was a reporter for Reuters International news agency in London, Frankfurt, Bonn, Dubai, and Moscow. Travel featured early and often in her life, and although her family is originally from Ireland, she grew up in England, South Africa, and Holland. She speaks fluent Spanish and French, and can muddle her way through in German, Russian, and Portuguese. She also holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. Tara is currently translating Argentine writer Ernesto Semán’s novel Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva China into English. She is also working on a nonfiction book project based around the dying Aral Sea in Central Asia.

Yardenne Greenspan was born in Tel Aviv, Israel to a bilingual family. She received her undergraduate degree from Tel Aviv University, where she majored in Comparative and Hebrew Literature and in Multidisciplinary Arts. She is currently in her second year at the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University, in a dual course of study of fiction and translation. She is the development manager for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts and an English-language manuscript reader for the Israeli publishing house Kinneret Zmora Bitan. Yardenne’s current translation projects are Life is Good, a fictionalized memoir by Rana Werbin; The Sequoia Children, a fantastical-historical novel by Gon Ben Ari; and Eating, a play by renowned playwright and author Yaakov Shabtai.

Nikki Settelmeyer is currently translating two short-story collections, Todas Putas and Putas es poco, by Spanish author Hernán Migoya. Her translations have appeared in Moon City Review and Art Amiss literary magazines. Naturally, Nikki learned Spanish growing up in North Dakota. She will receive an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas in May 2012.

2010 alta travel fellows

Dustin Lovett is a recent graduate of The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with degrees in Comparative Literature and German and a Certificate in Translation Studies. Two of his translations from German appeared in the anthology Best European Fiction 2010 (Dalkey Archive Press), and another is set to appear in the 2011 edition of the same. He currently resides in Vienna, Austria, where he is working under a combined Fulbright grant, teaching English and researching methods of literary translation that can foster better cultural exchange.

Lucas Millheim is a writer and translator. Born in the hills of New Jersey and raised in the middle of cornfields in the Midwest, he studied English and German literature at The University of Michigan and The University of Tübingen. He lives in Hamburg, Germany, with a lovely view of the harbor.

Juliana Nalerio was born in New York to a bicultural, bilingual family. Currently, she is at New College of Florida working on her thesis on translation and the prose-poems of Alejandra Pizarnik — an Argentinean Jewish poet. Travels to Argentina, Uruguay, and Israel have broadened her interests in translation, identity, and art. After graduation in 2011, Juliana hopes to pursue literary translation and creative non-fiction after a year abroad.

Thomas Pruiksma is a writer, poet, and translator who translates from Tamil and from Spanish. His book Give, Eat, and Live: Poems of Avvaiyar was recently published by Red Hen Press. He has also been working on a new translation of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. When he is not at work on his own writing, Thomas performs as a magician, combining the arts of poetry and illusion in something he calls The Poet’s Magic (thepoetsmagic.com). He lives on Vashon Island in Washington State.

Yoshihisa Tomonaga, born in Chiba, Japan, came to the U.S. in 2004. He received an MFA in Translation in 2010 from Queens College, The City University of New York. He has been co-translating (with Kimiko Hahn) Japanese non-fiction works called zuihitsu. The translations include works by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Shiki Masaoka. He has also been working on translations of Japanese short stories. He lives in Queens, New York.

2009 ALTA Travel Fellows

Meg Arenberg recently began translating Swahili prose and poetry into English after spending several years living and working in Tanzania. Her work on Said A. Mohamed’s Utengano has been aided by close correspondence with the author himself. Meg studied creative writing at Oberlin College and is currently a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, focusing in comparative African literature and literary translation.

Robin Myers, born in New York and raised in New Jersey, will graduate from Swarthmore College this year, 2009. She first became interested in translation while living in Oaxaca, Mexico—most essentially, she thinks, as a result of having to live her life in another language (which is to say, to translate it) for the first time. Robin subsequently studied Latin American poetry and the translation thereof in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. She is working on a collection of her own poems and hopes to pursue translation both in literary and social service contexts.

Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz has served Temple Bnai Israel in Willimantic, Conn., since fall 2000. He is a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and served as the Assistant Director of “Kolel: A Centre for Liberal Jewish Learning” in Toronto prior to coming to Connecticut. His wide range of teaching interests includes particular emphases on prayer and siddur, Modern Hebrew poetry, and the theology of tikkun olam. His publications include commentaries in the Reconstructionist Prayerbook for the High Holidays, as well as translations of the works of two pioneers of non-Orthodox Israeli spirituality: A.D. Gordon and Ari Elon.

Oksana Jackim is an adjunct faculty member of the English and Liberal Arts Departments at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She is also a writer, translator, and editor. A native speaker of Ukrainian, she learned and taught English in the former Soviet Union. In 1998, she moved to the United States, where she studied professional writing, rhetoric, and translation. She appreciates the gilt of speaking several languages of Eastern European cultures with an American audience. She divides her time between academic work and training Newfoundland dogs for water rescue and draft.

2008 ALTA Travel Fellows

Peter Bull’s first serious translation project was a Pablo Neruda manuscript that he worked on while living in Neruda’s hometown of Valapariso, Chile. As he grappled with the intricacies of Neruda’s complex poetic voice, Peter’s appreciation for the joys of translation began to blossom. Since then, he has translated the poems of Nicanor Parra, worked on medieval aljamiado manuscripts—Spanish texts written in Arabic script, and dabbled in contemporary Arabic poetry. Most recently, he has become interested in contemporary Turkish poetry.

Peter Golub is a Moscow-born poet and translator. His translations can be found in Circumference, St. Petersburg Review, and other journals. He has also edited an anthology of contemporary Russian poetry for the online magazine Jacket. A bilingual edition of his poems, My Imagined Funeral, was published in 2007. He holds an MFA in poetry from The University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Jordan Pleasant’s translations have appeared in the Journal of Italian Translation, Gradiva, Two Lines: Literature in Translation, the South Asian Review, and Café Irreal. In 2004 he was awarded the Poetry Prize for original poems from the Northern Kentucky Writers’ Alliance. Pleasant is currently studying philosophy and linguistics at Ohio University.

Andrea Rosenberg is an MFA candidate in the University of Iowa’s literary translation program and co-editor of eXchanges, the university’s online translation journal. She translates from Spanish and has recently been working on a translation of Alfredo Iriarte’s Bestiario tropical: crónicas de dictadores, a collection of hilarious, grotesque biographies of Latin American dictators.

2007 ALTA Travel Fellows

Edward Gauvin
Anna Guercio
Deborah Hoffman
Miriam O'Neal
Jeannette S. Rogers
Matthew Rowe

2004 ALTA Travel Fellows

Don Mee Choi
Sylwia Ejmont
Becka Mara McKay
Jamie Richards
Terje Saar-Hambazaza

2002 ALTA Travel Fellows

Alison Entrekin
Chris Michalski
Aiden Selsick

2001 ALTA Travel Fellows

Traci Andrighetti
Sara Friedman

2000 ALTA Travel Fellows

Charles Dean Hatfield
Oona Stransky

1999 ALTA Travel Fellows

Marina Allemano
Sarah Barr
Suzanne Broegger
Philip Metres
Jane Chamberlain
Lily Liu
Seth Owen
Yunona Tukachuk

1998 ALTA Travel Fellows

Blanca Acosta
Susan Benner
Fabian Iriarte
Damion Searls

1997 ALTA Travel Fellows

Christopher Mattison
Sabina Josephine Piersol
Andree C. Zaleska

1996 ALTA Travel Fellows

C. Dickson
Bodil Jelhof Jensen
Wyatt Alexander Mason
Elizabeth Oehlkers
Thom Satterlee
Laura Wolfson

1995 ALTA Travel Fellows

Renee Fauth
Dana Loewy
Sergio Gabriel Waisman
Sonia Wichmann

1994 ALTA Travel Fellows

Seema Atalla
Margaret Carson
Phillip Lunceford
Aaron Keith Perkus
Kate Peters
Juliet Pierce
Laima Sruoginis
Ken Wishnia