Each year, between four and six $1,000 Travel Fellowships are awarded to emerging (unpublished or minimally published) translators to help them pay for hotel and travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference. Included in these Fellowships is the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship, which is preferentially awarded to an emerging translator of color or a translator working from an underrepresented diaspora or stateless language. At the conference, ALTA Fellows are invited to read their translated work at a keynote event, giving them an opportunity to present their translations to an audience of translators, authors, editors, and publishers from around the world. Applications are being accepted this year until May 4.
This year, we are delighted to have David Ball, Bonnie Chau, and Tenzin Dickie as our Travel Fellowship judges! Learn more about them below:
A past president of ALTA, David Ball’s latest translations are Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Coma Crossing: Collected Poems and Marco Koskas, Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv. He translated and edited two French diaries written during the Nazi Occupation: Léon Werth, Deposition 1940-1944: A Secret Diary of Life in Vichy France and Jean Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years won the French-American Foundation’s 2014 translation prize in non-fiction (Oxford UP for both.) His Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology 1927-1984 won MLA’s prize for literary translation in 1995. His own poetry has appeared in half a dozen chapbooks and many ephemeral magazines. He is Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Smith College.
Bonnie Chau is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood, and her 
writing has appeared in Flaunt, The Offing, Joyland, Two Lines, Fence, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in fiction with a joint concentration in literary translation from Columbia University. She was a 2017 ALTA Travel fellow, and has also received fellowships from Kundiman, Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony. She works at McNally Jackson Books in Brooklyn, and is associate web editor at the nonprofit Poets & Writers.
Tenzin Dickie is a poet, writer and translator. She is editor of The Treasury of Lives, a biographical encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan region. Her edited anthology, Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet, was published in 2017 by OR Books. She holds an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia and a BA in English literature from Harvard. A former ALTA fellow, she was recently a Fulbright fellow in Kathmandu.