L to R (top row): Shabnam Nadiya; Madeleine Stratford; Jenny Bhatt; Daisy Rockwell; May Huang; Jennifer Feeley;
L to R (middle row): Takami Nieda; Srinath Perur; Kalpana Raina; Jack Jung; Janet Hong; poupeh missaghi;
L to R (bottom row): Bill Johnston; Arshia Sattar; Rachel Willson-Broyles; Lin King; Afsar Mohammad; Sana R. Chaudhry]
October 3, 2024–We are excited to introduce you to the 2025 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program mentors! The ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program is designed to establish and facilitate a close working relationship between an experienced translator and an emerging translator on a project selected by the emerging translator. This program was founded by former ALTA Board member Allison M. Charette.
The applications for the 2025 mentorship program cycle are open on our Submittable page until November 30, 2024 at 11:59pm PT.
The following 18 mentorships are available in 2025:
- Bangla, with mentor Shabnam Nadiya
- Contemporary Literature from Québec, with mentor Madeleine Stratford
- Gujarati, with mentor Jenny Bhatt
- Hindi, with mentor Daisy Rockwell
- Poetry from Hong Kong, with mentor May Huang
- Prose from Hong Kong, with mentor Jennifer Feeley
- Japanese, with mentor Takami Nieda
- Kannada, with mentor Srinath Perur
- Kashmiri, with mentor Kalpana Raina
- Korean poetry, with mentor Jack Jung
- Korean prose, with mentor Janet Hong
- Persian, with mentor poupeh missaghi
- Polish, with mentor Bill Johnston
- Premodern, Classical, or Early Modern Literature from a South Asian language, with mentor Arshia Sattar
- Swedish, with mentor Rachel Willson-Broyles
- Literature from Taiwan, with mentor Lin King
- Telugu, with mentor Afsar Mohammad
- Urdu, with mentor Sana R. Chaudhry
Learn more about the mentors below (listed below alphabetically by mentorship language):
Shabnam Nadiya is a Bangladeshi writer and translator. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was awarded the 2019 Steinbeck Fellowship; a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Grant; a 2022 PEN Presents grant, and the 2019 Himal Southasian Short Story Prize for her translation of Mashiul Alam’s Milk. Her published translations include Mashiul Alam’s The Meat Market: Ten Stories and a Novella (Westland, 2024), Leesa Gazi’s Good Girls (Amazon Crossing, 2023), and Shaheen Akhtar’s Beloved Rongomala (Westland Books, 2022). Her translations and writing have been published in journals and anthologies including Himal Southasian, the W.W. Norton Flash Fiction International, The Best Asian Poetry 2021-22, and the New York Public Library’s Pocket Poems series. For more: www.shabnamnadiya.com.
Image description: Nadiya, a Bengali woman, is standing in front of trees on a sunny day. Her hair is shoulder length, black in color with purple streaks. She is wearing an orange and red shawl, and peacock feather earrings. Her metallic blue hearing aid coil is visible.
Madeleine Stratford is a poet, a literary translator, and an Associate Professor at Université du Québec en Outaouais. Her translations have been shortlisted for the Governor General award in Canada (2016, 2019, 2021, 2023), as well as for the Young Readers Kirkus Prize in the US (2017). Her recent work includes Québécois classic Swallowed [L’Avalée des avalés] by Réjean Ducharme (Véhicule Press, 2020) and Canadian bestseller Cours vers le danger [Run Towards the Danger] by Sarah Polley (Boréal, 2024).
Image description: Madeleine, a white woman with light chestnut brown hair cut in a short bob, stands in front of a white background printed with the phrase “Créer du lien” in white or black. She wears a black sweater dress with an oversized collar. She has blue eyes and freckles, wears red lipstick, and is smiling at the camera.
Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, and writing instructor. Her story collection, Each of Us Killers, won a 2020 Foreword INDIES award. Her literary translation, The Shehnai Virtuoso, was shortlisted for the PFC-VoW award in India. Her nonfiction has been published at venues like The Guardian, NPR, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, The Atlantic, Dallas Morning News, Poets & Writers, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Star Tribune, and more. More details at jennybhattwriter.com.
Image description: Jenny, a South Asian woman with shoulder-length straight gray hair, is indoors and seated against a black background. She is leaning forward with her arms crossed over the back of a brown leather chair. She wears a dark purple jacket and smiles at the camera.
Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand won the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2020, she was the winner of the Scaglioni Prize for Translation of a Literary Work for Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. She has received grants for her translations from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Image description: A middle-aged woman with glasses stares at the camera, her chin resting on her hand.
May Huang is a translator and writer from Hong Kong. Her translation of Derek Chung’s A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist was published in 2023 via Zephyr Press. Her writing and translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, Circumference, Electric Literature, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. May was a mentee in ALTA’s 2020 Emerging Translators Mentorship Program, during which she was mentored by Jennifer Feeley and translated the majority of A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist. Outside of translation, May swing dances, constructs crossword puzzles, and works in communications.
Image description: May, an Asian woman with shoulder-length black hair, is pictured outdoors. She wears glasses with a cat-eye shape and smiles at the camera with her head tilted. She is wearing a blue shirt with floral patterns, and a simple necklace.
Jennifer Feeley is the translator of Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast, Not Written Words, and Carnival of Animals, as well as Lau Yee-Wa’s novel Tongueless, Chen Jiatong’s White Fox series, and Wong Yi’s Cantonese chamber opera libretto Women Like Us. Her forthcoming translations include Xi Xi’s novel My City. She is the recipient of the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.
Image description: Jennifer, a white woman with long blonde hair and blue eyes, is seated against a plain white background with her legs crossed. She wears a red patterned blouse and black pants. Her head is slightly tilted, and she smiles at the camera, with one hand placed against her face and the other hand resting on one knee.
Takami Nieda is a two-time winner of the Freeman Book Award for YA Literature for her translations of GO by Kazuki Kaneshiro and The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart by Chesil. She is currently translating Recovery Hippo by Michiko Aoyama. Nieda serves on the advisory board of the University of Washington Translation Studies Hub and teaches writing and literature at Seattle Central College.
Image description: Takami, an Asian woman with short brown-black hair, stands with her arms folded, against a black background. She wears tortoise-shell glasses and a brown v-neck sweater over a pink-pinstripe blouse.
Srinath Perur translates from Kannada to English and writes on a variety of subjects, often around science, travel, and books. He is the author of If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai, a book about traveling with groups. He is the translator of two works of fiction by Vivek Shanbhag (Ghachar Ghochar and Sakina’s Kiss) and the memoirs of Girish Karnad (This Life At Play). He spends his time between Bangalore and Dharamshala.
Image description: Srinath, a brown-skinned man with close-cropped black hair, is outdoors smiling into the camera. He is wearing a dull teal pullover with a light-coloured shirt collar visible at the neck. The background has blurred foliage with red rhododendron flowers.
Kalpana Raina was born in Kashmir and lives in New York. She is a senior executive with extensive financial, management and advisory experience internationally. Kalpana is currently the Vice Chair at Words Without Borders, a premier online journal of translations. Her collaborative translation project of stories from the Kashmiri language, For Now, It Is Night, is her first work of translation. The book was published by HarperCollins in India and by Archipelago Press in the U.S. Her writings have appeared in Lit Hub and Words Without Borders. Linked In profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalpana-raina-9045579
Image description: Kalpana, a brown woman with short gray and brown hair against a dark background. Head slightly angled, wide smile, red lipstick and studs in ears. Wearing a black, high collar jacket.
Jack Jung is a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow currently working on translating Kim Hyesoon’s collection Thus Spoke No. He studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020). His poetry and translations have been published in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, BOMB Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, Chicago Review, The Margins, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. His first book of poetry, Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus, will be published by Black Square Editions in 2025. He teaches at Davidson College.
Image description: Jack, an Asian man with short black hair leans back against a wall with a graffiti portrait of Korean poet Yi Sang. Jack is wearing a red t-shirt with a blue linen shirt over it. Yi Sang is painted in black and white.
Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the TA First Translation Prize and the LTI Korea Translation Award for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale. A two-time winner of the Harvey Award for Best International Book for her translations of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass and Yeong-shin Ma’s Moms, she has been a mentor for the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program since 2020. Recent translations include Hwang Jungeun’s Years and Years and Ha Seong-nan’s Wafers.
Image description: This photograph shows a Korean woman with dark shoulder-length hair and red highlights, wearing a black sweater. She is looking to the side away from the camera against a light gray background. Photo credit: Laura Pak
poupeh missaghi is the translator of, most recently, Boys of Love (by Ghazi Rabihavi) and In the Streets of Tehran (by Nila), both from Persian. Her own books include Sound Museum and trans(re)lating house one (with Coffee House Press, 2024 and 2020). She is Assistant Professor of Literary Arts and Studies at the University of Denver and faculty mentor at the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR.
Image description: poupeh, a woman of color, is standing by an old building in the evening. She has her black hair pulled back in a bun, wears red lipstick, and looks to her right. she has a black jumpsuit on and gold earrings, and we only see her upper torso.
Bill Johnston received the 2019 National Translation Award in Poetry for his rendering of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic narrative poem in rhyming couplets Pan Tadeusz (Archipelago Books, 2018). He translates from Polish and French; his recent translations have included work by Julia Fiedorczuk, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, and Jeanne Benameur. His numerous honors include the PEN Translation Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches literary translation at Indiana University, where he is currently serving as Michael Henry Heim Chair in Central and East European Letters.
Image description: Bill, a man with close-cut graying hair and beard and wearing thin-framed glasses, is dressed in a gray rain jacket and scarf as he stands on a windswept beach on an overcast day. He is looking at the camera and smiling faintly.
Arshia Sattar has a PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. She has translated Valmiki’s Ramayana from Sanskrit, as well as stories from Somadeva’s Kathasaritsagara. She works with the epics and the story-telling traditions of the Indian subcontinent.
Image description: Arshia is a South Asian woman with dark shoulder length hair. She is outdoors on a sunny day and she is smiling. She is wearing a white cotton shirt and a pink and white patterned scarf.
Rachel Willson-Broyles is a freelance translator specializing in translating contemporary literature from Swedish to English. She received her BA in Scandinavian Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2002 and her PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. Recent translations include Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius and Blaze Me a Sun by Christoffer Carlsson. Rachel lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Image description: Rachel, a white woman with curly brown hair worn up in a bun, leans against a wall in a studio. She wears red glasses and smiles at the camera. She wears a black blazer over a black shirt with white polka dots.
Lin King 金翎 is a writer and translator from Taipei, Taiwan. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, and Joyland, among others, and has received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Translations from Mandarin and Japanese into English include Yang Shuang-Zi’s novel Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf, forthcoming 2024) and the historical graphic novel series The Boy from Clearwater (Levine Querido, 2023-2024) by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin. Lin holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Columbia University, where she has taught undergraduate writing.
Image description: Lin, an East Asian woman with medium-length black hair, is smiling in front of a red brick wall and stone balustrades. She wears a gray-green shirt that is collared and sleeveless.
Afsar Mohammad teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes in Telugu and English. Widely published in both languages, he is now working on Sufi poetry translations from the South Indian language of Telugu. He also published with Cambridge and Oxford. Known for his deeply moving poetry and short fiction in Telugu, he represents a new trend in the post-1980s literary scene. He also published a collection of poems Evening with a Sufi (New Delhi: Red River Press).
Image description: Indian poet, translator, professor Afsar Mohammad in a literary gathering.
Sana R. Chaudhry is a researcher, writer, translator, and educator. She works on South Asian literature, and she has a particular interest in literatures of the body, trauma, witnessing, and silence. Presently, she is teaching writing and literature at the University of North Florida, USA. Among her honors, she has been awarded the Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-English Translation 2022-23, and the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Translation 2024. Her work has appeared in Literature, Critique, and Empire Today, Wasafiri, The Paris Review, South Parade, and The Bombay Literary Magazine. Her monograph Experiments in Silence: The Urdu Short Story after 1947 is forthcoming from Clemson University Press in Spring 2025.
Image description: Sana, a brown woman with long, dark wavy hair, is standing by a parapet wall on a sunny afternoon with a lush tree in the background. She is wearing a colorfully embroidered navy blue kurta and smiling at the camera.
View our webpage for more information, our submissions portal to submit, and find answers to common questions at the mentorship FAQ. We are proud of our former mentees’ many accomplishments; follow this link to check them out!
The mentorships are offered by ALTA in partnership with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, the Mo Habib Prize at the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Washington, the Polish Cultural Institute New York, Québec Édition, the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global, the South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) Project, the Swedish Arts Council, the Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, and the Yanai Initiative.
Applications must be submitted online through our submission platform by November 30, 2024 at 11:59pm PT!
