As we get closer to the conference, watch this space for ALTA47 program updates, including information about the keynote speaker, sessions, and local partnerships in Milwaukee!

Read the ALTA47 Overview

Keynote Speaker

Get Involved

Keynote Speaker: Kaiama Glover

Kaiama L. Glover is a professor of African American Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke University Press) and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool University Press), as well as of numerous essays, articles, and chapters concerning race, gender, and representation in the francophone world. She is currently at work on a biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life” (forthcoming with Liveright/Norton).  

Professor Glover is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction – notably, Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst, Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano, Yanick Lahens’s Sweet Undoings, and René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams and Popa Singer – and of francophone non-fiction, including Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, and Feminism, Maboula Soumahoro’s Black is the Journey, Africana the Name, and Audrey Celestine’s A French Family. She has written articles on translation for Esprit Créateur and PMLA, and has been developing a collection of essays tentatively titled “Race Matters in Translation.” Whether translating or writing about the process, she delights in the intimacies made possible by bringing two language-worlds into relation.

In addition to academic writing and translation, Kaiama is the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. She has also been a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, the co-host of the podcast WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean, and a presenter on shows for both PBS and the History Channel. 

Her various scholarly, translation, and digital humanities work has been generously supported by fellowships and awards from the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

Get Involved

There are lots of ways to get involved at ALTA47. Please consider the following opportunities and deadlines, and check back for more as conference programming develops.

Find Us on Facebook
Get conference updates, plan local events, find friends, and share events you're excited about in our ALTA Conferences Facebook Group.

Accepted Sessions
Find a list of sessions accepted for ALTA47 at this link. The final schedule will be released in August.

Upcoming Deadlines

For Publishers: ALTA47 Organizational Member Bookfair
Publishers who wish to have a table in the ALTA47 bookfair must sign up as Organizational Members of ALTA (learn more and sign up by emailing Sophia Marisa Lucas, ALTA's Membership and Digital Projects Coordinator). You will then be able to reserve your table at the same time as you register yourself for the conference. Conference registration opens July 10, and tables are first-come, first-served, so sign up early! 

Sessions Seeking Participants
Some accepted panels and workshops were proposed "seeking participants." Interested attendees are invited to write to the session organizer directly to join these sessions. The deadline is July 30.

Bilingual Readings
Slots for ALTA's Annual Bilingual Reading Series (in-person only, no option to join virtually) are open until filled (first-come, first-served). Use this form to sign up. You may also add yourself to the wait list if categories that apply to you have filled.The deadline is July 31. 

Share Info about an Offsite Event
ALTA offers the option to include your offsite reading, reception, or other event in Milwaukee in the ALTA47 schedule. Our program book is edited, designed, and printed in the summer; that's why the deadline to include an offsite event in the program book is July 31. Submit your offsite event info through this form.

Complimentary Registration
ALTA offers a lottery signup for a limited number of complimentary in-person ALTA47 registrations designed for those with financial hardship or who come from communities traditionally underrepresented at ALTA. Apply through this form. The deadline is August 31.

Work Exchange Program
In exchange for free ALTA47 registration, work exchange volunteers will assist ALTA staff for a few hours with various tasks related to putting on our conference. Applications will open on July 16 and the deadline is September 5.

Wayfinders Program
Are you attending ALTA's conference for the first time this year? Or are you a seasoned expert of punctuation panels, riveting readings, and dynamic Declamación? If you are looking for an "in" to this year's programming, or if you want to be someone else's, the Wayfinders program is for you. Our community is growing, and as we see attendance increase, we know you want ALTA47 to be as warm, welcoming, and intimate an experience as we do. Our goal is to pair up translators joining ALTA programming for the first time with those who know it best. Use this form to sign up. The deadline to sign up is October 7. 

Declamación
Mark your calendars to join your fellow translators, declaimers, and enthusiasts for our annual evening of Declamación! You must recite (or sing) from memory (no reading). Time allotment is 5 minutes. We will begin with those who sign up in advance, and then, time permitting, an open mic will follow. The signup deadline is October 20, but anyone is welcome to join the open mic. Signup in advance using this form.

ALTA47 Virtual Bookfair
All books requested through this form will automatically be added to our Bookshop.org virtual ALTA47 bookfair (if they are available on Bookshop). There is no limit to the number of books each person may request. The deadline to request a book is October 20. 

Cold Beer, Cold Readings
If you've translated a play (or part of a play), you're invited to participate in Cold Beer, Cold Readings by bringing to the event copies of a 5-minute scene to be performed script-in-hand by volunteers. More info to come!

Help Make ALTA47 Greener!
Please join ALTA in our effort to reduce waste. On the final day of the conference, receptacles will be available at the registration table in the Hyatt, for you to recycle your used tote bags (they'll be donated), name badge holders (they will be reused next year), and program books. If you'd like to keep any of these items, you're still welcome to!

past deadlines

Propose a Panel or Workshop
ALTA members had the option to propose panels or workshops between March 7 and June 17, 2024. Find the Proposal Guidelines at this link.