Elisabeth Jaquette
Executive Director
Elisabeth Jaquette joined ALTA in April 2017 as Managing Director. She is also a translator from Arabic; her translation of Minor Detail by Adania Shibli was a finalist for the National Book Awards and longlisted for the Booker International Prize. Other translations include Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun (nominated for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation) and The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz (nominated for the Best Translated Book Award and TA First Translation Prize). Elisabeth has served as a judge for the National Book Award in Translated Literature, the NEA Literary Translation Fellowships, the PEN Center USA Translation Award, and the PEN America Translation Prize. She holds an MA from Columbia University, a BA from Swarthmore College, and was a CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo. She has also taught translation at Bread Loaf Translators Conference and Hunter College, CUNY. Find her on Twitter at @lissiejaquette.
Kelsi Vanada
Program Director
Kelsi Vanada joined ALTA as Program Manager in July 2018. Her book-length translations include The Visible Unseen by Andrea Chapela, Damascus, Atlantis: Selected Poems by Marie Silkeberg (longlisted for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), Into Muteness by Sergio Espinosa, and The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet. She has also published a chapbook of original poems, Rare Earth. Kelsi holds MFAs in Poetry (The Iowa Writers' Workshop) and Literary Translation (The University of Iowa). She received the 2018 Nadia Christensen Translation Prize from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, was a 2016 ALTA Travel Fellow, and enjoys building a readership for literature in translation by writing reviews and teaching occasional translation classes. Find her on Twitter @KelsiVanada.
Rachael Daum
Communications & Awards Manager
Rachael Daum has worked with ALTA since 2014. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation from the Serbian of Lusitania by Dejan Atanackovic, and she is the translator from the Russian of Letters to Robot Werther by Natalia Rubanova (Carrion Bloom Books, 2021). Her original work and translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, The Los Angeles Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Two Lines Journal, and elsewhere. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Rochester and MA in Slavic Studies from Indiana University; she also received Certificates in Literary Translation from both institutions. Rachael translates from Serbian, Russian, and German. She lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Find her on Twitter at @rclouisedaum.
Sophia Marisa Lucas
Membership & Digital Projects Coordinator
Sophia Marisa Lucas joined ALTA in 2023. An arts administrator, curator, editor, and writer, she was raised in a bilingual Luso-American household and, from an early age, was drawn to poetry, rhythm, and nature. Previously she worked primarily in contemporary visual art, leading and supporting numerous exhibitions, publications, and digital projects with a conceptual focus on how we contend with the systems that shape our lives—from algorithms and municipal structures to narrative forms and linguistics.
Valentina Vinokurova
University of Arizona Graduate Assistant
Valentina Vinokurova joined ALTA as a Graduate Assistant in May 2022. She holds a BA with a double major in Economics and World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures from Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, an MA in Russian Literature from McGill University, Canada, and another MA in Russian Language and Linguistics from the University of Arizona. She is now pursuing a PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. Her research interests include multiliteracies pedagogy and curriculum design, language program direction and evaluation, technology and language learning, translanguaging, and second language identity.