The ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program is designed to facilitate and establish a close working relationship between an experienced translator and an emerging translator on a project selected by the emerging translator. The mentorship duration is nine months. The emerging translator is expected to choose a project that can be completed in this timeframe, and they will only be advised on that particular project. Congratulations to this year’s Korean poetry mentee, Stine Su Yon An, who will be mentored by Joyelle McSweeney:

Stine Su Yon An (안수연) is a Korean American poet, performer, and stand-up comedian. Her work has appeared in BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing, Emergency Index: An Annual Document of Performance Practice, Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, the minnesota review, Nat. Brut, and elsewhere. She has also presented her performance work at &Now and Virtual International Exchange.

Stine pursued a BA in Literature at Harvard College as a first-generation college student and is completing an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University. Her interdisciplinary thesis explores diasporic poetics, experimental translation, K-pop, virtual performance, and counter-hegemonic modes for presenting and performing identity.

Born in Cheon’an, South Korea, Stine immigrated to Birmingham, Alabama at 21 months old in 1990. She grew up speaking Korean within her extended family and the broader Korean communities in the Atlanta metropolitan area. She studied English in the Gwinnett County Public Schools and through the American media, and spent the Saturdays of her youth learning Korean at the Korean-American School of Atlanta. While Stine has translated for most of her life, her earliest memories of literary translation are translating lines of Catullus and Ovid with the greatest delight for a high school Latin class.

In 2007, Stine moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend Harvard College, where she studied Korean and German language and literature and explored her growing interest in the visual arts, creative writing, and stand-up comedy. After graduation, Stine worked in the greater Boston area as a researcher at the Harvard Business School and as a technical writer and communications manager for Boston-area tech companies. She also co-organized a salon on technology and ethics and curated art and performance exhibitions investigating the themes of work and metamorphosis. Stine has been active in the Boston stand-up comedy scene and has performed nationally and internationally at colleges, comedy clubs, and comedy festivals including the Boston Comedy Festival, All Jane Comedy Festival, Cinderblock Comedy Festival, and Women in Comedy Festival.

Stine started writing poetry in 2016 while attending the MFA program at Bard College. She continued her graduate studies in the Literary Arts MFA program at Brown University. This past fall, Stine completed a literary translation workshop with the literary translator and artist Sawako Nakayasu at Brown University. As an emerging literary translator, Stine looks forward to learning from contemporary Korean poets and sharing their work and poetics with a larger audience. She is honored to join the literary translation community and is excited to attend her first ALTA conference in the fall. During the mentorship program, Stine hopes to translate a collection of poems by the contemporary South Korean poet and comedic playwright Yoo Heekyung.

This mentorship is being offered by ALTA in partnership with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.