September 20, 2019—ALTA is delighted to announce the mentors for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Program mentorships in Korean prose and poetry! The ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program is designed to establish and facilitate a close working relationship between an experienced translator and an emerging translator on a project selected by the emerging translator. ALTA’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Program was founded by former ALTA board member Allison M. Charette. This applications for the 2020 mentorship program cycle are open on our Submittable page.

The Korean prose mentorship will be offered with mentor Janet Hong, and the Korean poetry mentorship will be offered with mentor Joyelle McSweeney. Find out more about them below. These mentorships are made available by ALTA in partnership with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the TA First Translation Prize and the 16th LTI Korea Translation Award for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale, which was a finalist for both the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and longlisted for the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award. She has translated Ha Seong-nan’s Flowers of Mold, Ancco’s Bad Friends, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass, and Yeon-sik Hong’s Umma’s Table.

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Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eight books of poetry, stories, novels, essays, translation and plays, including the verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks, which inaugurated the Scalapino Prize for Women Playwrights, and The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a work of decadent ecopoetics. With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books, publishing such authors as Raúl Zurita, Hiromi Ito, Josué Guébo and Kim Hyesoon, while supporting translators like Daniel Borzutzky, Don Mee Choi, Katerine Hedeen, Katrine Øgaard Jensen, Michelle Gil-Montero, Jeffrey Angles, and many others. McSweeney’s ninth book, a double volume of poetry called Toxicon & Arachne, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in Winter 2020. She teaches at Notre Dame.

This year, we’re excited to offer six mentorships: Non-language-specific, non-genre-specific, with mentor Kareem James Abu-Zeid; poetry from Hong Kong, with mentor Jennifer Feeley; Catalan poetry or prose, with mentor Mara Faye Lethem; Korean prose with Janet Hong; Korean poetry with Joyelle McSweeney; and Russian prose, with mentor Marian Schwartz. Find out more about them all here, and apply by December 8!