2025 Schedule of Events

SESSION 1

RESIDENCIES AND RETREATS: HOW AND WHY TO APPLY

Residencies and retreats can be excellent opportunities to work on your translation project, make new professional and personal relationships, and find rest and regeneration for your practice as a translator. In this session, we’ll chat with translators from prose, poetry, and drama about their experiences as both residents and selection committee members, as well as working directly with an author at a residency. What criteria should you consider when deciding where to apply? What makes a strong application? And once you’re accepted, how can you best set your intentions so as to have a fulfilling experience at your residency?

Moderator: Allison Charette

Panelists: Sarah Audsley, Mara Faye Lethem, Pedro Chamale

Allison M. Charette translates literature from French into English, with a current focus on Malagasy authors. She founded ELTNA.org, a networking and support group for early-career translators. Her next novel is Return by Raharimanana (Seagull Books, July 2025). Find her online at charettetranslations.com.

Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She serves as the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center.

Mara Faye Lethem is a writer, researcher, and literary translator from Catalan and Spanish. Winner of the Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award and the Lewis Galantière Award, she is currently a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow. Her novel, A Person’s A Person, No Matter How Small, has been translated into two languages.

Pedro Chamale (he/him) was born and raised on Treaty 8 territory, unceded, ancestral and traditional territories of the Treaty 8 Nations. He was a 2014 artistic resident at Neworld Theatre and a member of the 2019 Banff Centre Playwrights Lab. He is artistic director of rice & beans theatre.

SESSION 2

FROM WRITERS TO READERS: THE IMPACT OF TRANSLATION AWARDS

Sponsored by the Sheikh Zayed Book Award

Over the last twenty years, there have been a number of awards established to promote, celebrate, and encourage publishing more books in translation, but who do these awards benefit? In this panel discussion, we will examine the impact of the awards on all areas of the publishing ecosphere—from writers to publishers to booksellers—to see how these awards work in practice, hosted by the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

Moderator: Erin Cox

Panelists: Spencer Rucchi, Michael Cooperson, Maya Solovej

Erin L. Cox has spent more than 25 years on the business development and promotional side of the publishing industry, working in book publicity at Scribner and HarperCollins, advertising sales and marketing at The New Yorker, and working with international organizations such as Frankfurter Buchmesse and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Recently, she took the role of Publisher at Publishing Perspectives, to help bring great stories to new markets. 

Spencer Ruchti is the author events manager for Third Place Books in Seattle, Washington. With Justin Walls, he co-founded the Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation in 2023, the only literary award that recognizes works of literature translated into English as selected by a committee of independent booksellers. Ruchti started as a bookseller in 2017, where he helped curate Harvard Book Store’s award-winning author series. He’s also worked in editorial roles at Boston Review and Tin House Books. Before Third Place Books, he was a bookseller at Broadway Books in Portland, Oregon. He lives in Seattle.

Michael Cooperson is an American author, translator, and currently a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. His research addresses the literary and cultural history of Southwest Asia in the pre-modern period, primarily through Arabic sources. His first two monographs focus on the age of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun (r. 813-33), who sponsored the translation of scientific works from Greek, Syriac, and other languages. Cooperson is the translator of Ibn al-Jawzi’s hagiographic Life of Ibn Hanbal (winner of the Sheikh Hamad Award, 2016) and of al-Hariri’s comical Impostures (winner of the Sheikh Zayed Award, 2021).

Maya Solovej is Assistant Editor and Publicity Manager at New Directions. Most recently she has been editing Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume and the rediscovered French writer Hélène Bessette’s Lily Is Crying, which will be forthcoming this June. She grew up in Copenhagen, and lives in Brooklyn.

SESSION 3

WORKSHOP TALK SHOP

Are you interested in organizing, leading, or participating in a translation workshop? In this session, experienced workshoppers will discuss various translation workshop formats (including bilingual and multilingual), how to offer and receive feedback, and the collaborative benefits of workshopping a translation.

Moderator: Denise Kripper

Panelists: Elizabeth Lowe, Cecilia Rossi, Regina Galasso

Denise Kripper is a bilingual literary translator and a translation studies scholar. She is the translation editor at Latin American Literature Today and the author of Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature. Her latest translation is Salt, by Argentine author Adriana Riva (Veliz Books, 2024).

Elizabeth Lowe translates Lusophone fiction from Brazil, Portugal, and Africa. She is a faculty member in the NYU Master’s program in Translation and Interpreting, and has conducted literary translation workshops for Kenyon College, ALTA, and the University of Illinois. Her memoir, Translating from the Portuguese: A Life Translated, is forthcoming by Tagus Press.

Cecilia Rossi is Professor of Literary Translation and convenor of the MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia where she also works for British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT). Her translation The Last Innocence and The Lost Adventures (Alejandra Pizarnik) (Ugly Duckling Presse) was shortlisted for the National Translation Awards for Poetry (ALTA) in 2020.

Regina Galasso is an author, translator, educator, and language access leader. She is the co-founder and co-editor of the book series TRANSLATED BY___ for Bloomsbury Academic. She is a board member of the Massachusetts Center for the Book and an advisory board member for the Planet Word Museum. She is Director of the Edwin C. Gentzler Translation Center and Associate Professor at UMass Amherst.

SESSION 4

NEW DIRECTIONS IN AFRICAN LITERARY TRANSLATION

The vibrant landscape of African literature is increasingly accessible to global audiences through translation, but the process is fraught with both immense opportunities and significant challenges. Four writer-translators from the continent lay out their analyses of the present and visions of the future, touching on, among other questions, practical challenges and gaps still to be filled, translation both into and out of African languages, translating and incorporating indigenous literary theory and frameworks, counterprogramming the dominance of English, and translation as a resource for multilingual writers and critics.

Moderator: Ibrahim Fawzy

Panelists: Bethlehem Attfield, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Tsitsi Ella Jaji

Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian writer and literary translator working between Arabic and English. Fawzy earned his BA and MA in Comparative Literature from Fayoum University, Egypt and is completing an MFA at Boston University. His accolades include a 2024-25 Global Africa Translation Fellowship, a 2024 PEN Presents Award, and the 2024 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship from ALTA.

Bethlehem Attfield is a PhD candidate at Birmingham University, researching the translation of African-language literature. Her translation of Yismake Worku’s Amharic novel, The Lost Spell, was shortlisted for the 2022 SoA Translation Prize. She is a recipient of the 2023-24 Global Africa Translation Fellowship and hosts the podcast Journey to Ethiopia with Story.

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is publisher of OlongoAfrica and author of Edwardsville by Heart (2018), Ìgbà Èwe: Translated Poems of Emily R. Grosholz (2021), and Èṣù at the Library & Other Poems (2024). He has been a Fulbright scholar, Miles Morland Writing Fellow, and Chevening Research Fellow. He is the current Africa co-editor of the Best Literary Translations anthology published by Deep Vellum.

Tsitsi Ella Jaji is Helen L. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University. Originally from Zimbabwe, Jaji’s two full-length poetry collections are Mother Tongues (2019) and Beating the Graves (2017). Her critical book, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford), won the African Literature Association’s First Book Prize.