The winners of the 2019 Travel Fellowships, including the fourth annual Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship, are here! Each year, ALTA provides four to six $1,000 fellowships to emerging translators to attend the annual ALTA conference.
This year’s winners were selected by judges Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Jim Kates, Sandy Kingery, and Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma. The 2019 ALTA Travel Fellowships are made possible thanks to the generous support of ALTA’s Past Presidents Council, the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fund, and numerous individual donors. Congratulations to these exceptional emerging translators, chosen from among ninety applicants:
Salazar Monárrez, 2019 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow (Spanish, 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.
Maia Evrona, 2019 ALTA Travel Fellow (Yiddish, 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.
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.
Anni Liu, 2019 ALTA Travel Fellow (Chinese – 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.
Gnaomi Siemens, 2019 ALTA Travel Fellow (Old English, Old Scots, 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.
If you love seeing the Travel Fellows spotlighted at our conference every year, we hope that you’ll help us keep fostering the work of emerging translators! 2019 marks 25 years of the Travel Fellowships: help us celebrate 25 years and donate to our Fall Campaign! $5, $10, $500, or any amount will help show your commitment to the work of supporting translators like these Fellows as they’re starting out. Donate today!