ALTA44: Annual Bilingual Reading Series: Prose Potpourri, hosted by Alexis Levitin

Translator, Author, Country, Language, Genre:

• Patience Haggin, Fausta Cialente, Italy, Italian, Fiction
• Ekaterina Petrova, Iana Boukova, Bulgaria, Bulgarian, Fiction
• Heather Green, Sarah Manigne, United States, French, Fiction
• Samantha Farmer, Jasna Jasna Žmak, Croatia, Croatian, Fiction
• Katherine Young, Narine Abgaryan, Russian, Russian Fiction
• Grace Sewell, reading with author Olga Krause, Russia, Russian, Fiction
• Irina Sadovina, Anna Nerkagi, Russia (Indigenous North), Russian, Fiction
• Paula Haydar, Basma Elkhatib, Lebanon, Arabic, Fiction
• Anna Chiafele, and Lisa Pike, Silvana La Spina, Italy, Italian, Fiction
• Cristina Pinto-Bailey, Maria Valeria Rezend, Brazil, Portuguese, Fiction

…

Readers

Patience Haggin translates Italian fiction. She studied Literary Translation at Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” in Naples, Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship. Her translations have been published by Dalkey Archive Press, Asymptote, and Circumference. Ekaterina Petrova is a literary translator and nonfiction writer. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her translation-in-progress of Iana Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow received a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Heather Green is the translator of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won (Octopus Books, 2018) and Guide to the Heart Rail (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2017). Her poetry collection No Other Rome was released in March of 2021 (Akron Poetry Series, Akron UP). Green is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art at George Mason University. Samantha Farmer is a translator from Serbo-Croatian from Austin, Texas. They are currently a doctoral student of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Katherine E. Young is the author of Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards and editor of Written in Arlington. She is the translator of Anna Starobinets, Akram Aylisli, Inna Kabysh, and numerous Russophone poets; she was named a 2017 NEA translation fellow. She served as the inaugural poet laureate for Arlington, Virginia. Grace Sewell is a junior at Swarthmore College with Honors majors in Russian and Spanish. She is also an alumna of the Yiddish Book Center’s 2021 Steiner Program. From 2020- 2021, she studied Russian to English translation at UW Milwaukee. She hopes to earn a PhD in Comparative Literature and practice translation professionally. Irina Sadovina translates mostly Russian-language works, such as a short story by Denis Osokin and a Holocaust survivor memoir by Svetlana-Kogan Rabinovich. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and another in Folklore. Coming from the minority ethnic community of the Meadow Mari, Sadovina is passionate about bringing diverse voices from Russia to the attention of Anglophone audiences. Paula Haydar is Assistant Professor of Arabic at the Department of World Languages, University of Arkansas. She has translated thirteen contemporary Arabic novels by Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian writers into English. She received her MFA in Literary Translation (1998) and PhD in Comparative Literature (2014) from the University of Arkansas. Anna Chiafele is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Auburn University, in Alabama. Together with Canadian writer Lisa Pike, Chiafele published a translation of Silvana La Spina’s novel Penelope with Bordighera Press in 2021. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Cristina Pinto-Bailey is a writer, scholar, translator, and college professor, interested in issues of gender and race in works by modern and contemporary Latin American women writers. She has published extensively in scholarly journals, as well as her own creative works, and translations of Brazilian fiction and poetry into English.