2021 ALTA Virtual Travel Fellows Reading (Free and open to the public)

In an event hosted by former ALTA Travel Fellow Robin Myers, the ten 2021 Fellows will read from their translations.

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Fatemeh Madani Sarbarani is an Iranian translator, playwright, and dramaturge. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance of the Americas from Arizona State University. She translates dramatic texts from Persian into English; and Middle Eastern, Latin American, and English plays into Persian. Additionally, Fatemeh took several Creative Writing courses at ASU, and wrote several prose poems. Her collection of writings was published on swanaancestralhub.org, a website dedicated to Middle Eastern and North African traditions and cultures.

Anushka Sen’s original poems have been published in magazines such as The Dalhousie Review, Eunoia Review, and Vayavya.

Michelle Kyoko Crowson is a Japanese American writer and emerging translator based out of the Pacific Northwest. She was awarded the 2019 Kyoko Selden Memorial Prize for her translation of Akiko Akazome’s (1974-2017) Akutagawa Award-winning novel The Maiden’s Betrayal. Michelle holds a Comparative Literature PhD from the University of Oregon, where she is currently a Research Assistant, translating classical Japanese and Chinese poetry for the “Tekagami and Kyōgire” digital exhibition, a stunning collection of calligraphy fragments from the 8th to the 17th centuries.

Christine Gutman received a PhD in Comparitive Literature University of Massachusetts Amherst with focuses on French, francophone and Yiddish literature. Her article “Smuggled Words: Textual Migration and Subversive Assimilation in the Translations of Isaac Bashevis Singer” appeared in the journal translation in 2013, and has signed her first publishing contract to translate Violaine Schwartz’s Papiers.

Currently, Lara is a PhD student in comparative literature at Harvard University. Her centers on literary and cultural circulation between Latin America and Indonesia, cultural violence, and post-dictatorship literatures.  Lara’s in-progress translation of Sabda Armandio’s s award-winning crime novel 24 Hours with Gaspar was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Grant. Lara is also translating the Brazilian novel The Women who Marched Under the Sun by Cristina Judar. Lara’s translations of Cristina Judar’s short fiction have been published in Cuíer (Two Lines Press), an anthology of LGBTQ+ Brazilian literature.

Calvin Olsen is a graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing MFA program, where he studied poetry under Robert Pinsky, David Ferry, and Nobel laureate Louise Glück. Calvin’s translation of João Luís Barreto Guimarães’s ninth collection, Mediterranean, was recently awarded the Willow Run Poetry Book Award and is forthcoming from Hidden River Arts in 2022. Calvin’s translations of individual poems from Guimarães’s tenth collection, Nomad, have appeared or are forthcoming in ANMLY, AzonaL, Columbia Journal, Harvard Review, Interim, LIT Magazine, and Salamander.

After several years teaching German Studies at universities, and English in various secondary schools in London, Marielle Sutherland decided to combine parenting with freelance translation, taking the Diploma in Translation with the Institute of Linguists. Her translation projects have included literary samples for various German publishers, literary translations in the journals InTranslation and Alchemy, and contributions to books on ballet, art, architecture, and photography. She is currently working on selected German texts for the forthcoming book Radio Pioneers and Forgotten Voices, 1924-1939 (for Edinburgh University Press). Marielle has taken part in the series Encounters: Writers and Translators in Conversation (organized by the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London), where she worked with the writer Ulrike Ulrich. She has also run a workshop for students at Newcastle University with the writer Ulrike Draesner, and has given lectures on translation to students at the University of York.

Over the past three years, Yilin Wang has translated work by authors such as Han Yu, Dai Wangshu, Ling Chen, and Gu Shi; their translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Pathlight, Samovar, and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (Tor Books). Yilin is also the creator of Literary Jianghu, a project that shares their translations of and research about Chinese wuxia (martial arts) fiction and related literary traditions, which has received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and been featured on podcasts such as the Translated Chinese Fiction podcast and Asians Represent!.

As An emerging translator, Candice Whitney is committed to translating the stories of contemporary Afro-Italian writers, and to making their stories accessible to English language reading audiences. Whitney has continued to seek to understand the lived experiences of being Black in Italy through collaborative projects with fellow Fulbright to Italy alumna, Barbara Ofosu-Somuah. One such project is Future. Il Domani Narrato dalle Voci di Oggi (effequ, 2019).

Anam Zafar has been published by ArabLit, World Kid Lit, the SpLitera Cultural Association, and the National Centre for Writing, and made an appearance at this summer’s inaugural Bila Hudood Festival for Arabic literature. She was also a translator-in-residence at the National Centre for Writing in May. Her current translation projects include Najat Abdel Samad’s In the Tenderness of War, a polyphonic collection of accounts from the Syrian conflict, and Mahmoud Shukair’s Me, My Friend, and the Donkey, a Palestinian fantasy-detective YA novel.