Translators

Jiyar Homer (@Jiyar_Homer) is a translator, editor, and language enthusiast in southern Kurdistan. He speaks Kurdish, English, Spanish, Arabic, and Persian. He is a co-editor and translator at the Kurdish literary magazine Îlyan. He was also a co-founder, co-editor, and translator for the Kurdish cinema magazine Cine-na. He has translated many works from the aforementioned languages into Kurdish and vice versa. His current projects include a co-translation with Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse of the short stories of Farhad Pirbal.

May Huang is a literary translator from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Her work has been published in Circumference, InTranslation, Asymptote, and elsewhere.

Ana Hudson has a master’s in Portuguese studies (history path) from King’s College London. She is responsible for the translations at Poems from the Portuguese, the most comprehensive anthology of twenty-first-century Portuguese poetry online (and offline). She published in English the book He Went to England: Impressions of an 18th Century Portuguese Aristocrat (Alêtheia, 2015) and lives in the UK.

William Maynard Hutchins, who teaches at Appalachian State University of North Carolina, was educated at Berea, Yale, and the University of Chicago. His translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, InTranslation, and Banipal Magazine of Modern Arabic Literature. He has received two Literary Translation Awards from the National Endowment for the Arts. His most recent translations are The Diesel by Thani Al-Suwaidi, A Land Without Jasmine by Wajdi al-Ahdal, The Grub Hunter by Amir Tag Elsir, and a newly revised translation of Return of the Spirit by Tawfiq al-Hakim.

Eric E. Hyett’s poetry most recently appeared in the Worcester Review, Cincinnati Review, Barrow Street, the Hudson Review, and Harvard Review Online. He is co-translator of Sonic Peace, by Kiriu Minashita, which was shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association’s 2018 National Translation Award.

Sacha Idell is a writer and translator from Northern California as well as coeditor and prose editor of the Southern Review. His stories appear in Ploughshares, New England Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. His translations include work by the Japanese writers Kyūsaku Yumeno and Toshirō Sasaki. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Aqsa Ijaz is a PhD student at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Her research focuses on the literary practices of early modern North India, especially of the Persian, Punjabi, and Urdu languages.

Elnur Imanbayli works at ADA University in Azerbaijan. He is deeply interested in learning about and promoting the heritage of his country.

Gesche Ipsen has a degree in English literature, a PhD in comparative literature from University College London, and was a commissioning editor for several years before becoming a freelance editor and translator.

Jayson Iwen is a poet, fiction writer, and professor who lives in the Twin Ports region of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Alexander Jabbari is the Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature at the University of Oklahoma. His book The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary Modernity between Iran and India is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Adriana X. Jacobs is the Cowley Lecturer in modern Hebrew literature at the University of Oxford and specializes in contemporary Israeli poetry and translation. She is completing her first book, Strange Cocktail: Poetics and Practices of Translation in Modern Hebrew Poetry.

Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from Arabic whose work has been shortlisted for the National Book Awards and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Her translations include Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, and The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz, among others. She is also executive director of Words Without Borders.

Lena Jayyusi is a professor emeritus of communication studies and writes on media, memory narratives, language, and visuality. Her translations of Arabic poetry and fiction include the medieval epic folktale The Adventures of Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan (Indiana University Press, 1991).

Photo: Chuck Kuan

Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a writer and translator whose work has been published in the Columbia Journal, Washington Square Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s poetry collection Third-Millennium Heart was recently shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and longlisted for the National Translation Award. She lives in New York City where she edits EuropeNow.

Bill Johnston is professor of comparative literature at Indiana University. He is one of the most prolific translators of Polish literature into English. His work has received the Found in Translation Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, the Transatlantyk Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous other honors.

Madeline Jones (@MadelineCJones) is a literary translator and book editor at Algonquin Books. She is currently completing a master’s degree in translation studies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and lives between Barcelona and New York. Her first book-length translation, María Elena Morán's Volver a cuándo, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Photo by Cybele Knowles

Fady Joudah has three poetry collections and four of poetry in translation from the Arabic. He is the recipient of the Yale Series prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Mohammed Kadalah has most recently published translations and short prose in Lyrikline and in the anthology Voices of the Arab Spring. Born and raised in Syria, he currently teaches Arabic at the University of Connecticut.

Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Arkansas. His translations have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons.

Russell Karrick is a poet/translator living between New York and Colombia. He was the winner of the Summer/Fall 2020 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts from Lunch Ticket. His poetry has appeared in Magma Poetry, Blue Earth Review, Jet Fuel Review, and 300 Days of Sun, among others. He is currently finishing his MFA in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Katie Kassam is a recent translation graduate from South London who currently lives in Scotland. She holds a masters in translation studies, specializing in translation between Russian and English, and a bachelor of arts in modern foreign languages and history, both from Durham University. Most recently she completed a six-month internship in editing and terminology at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. She enjoys theater, painting, and exploring science fiction and fantasy across cultures.

Aziza Kasumov grew up in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany, but has spent the past eight years of her life in the US, first in Los Angeles, then in New York. She studied international relations and journalism at the University of Southern California and worked as a reporter for news organizations on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Financial Times and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction writing at Columbia University. Her faculty sponsor for this submission was Susan Bernofsky from Columbia University.

J. Kates is a minor poet and literary translator. His translations of Aigerim Tazhi’s poems, Paper-Thin Skin, were published by Zephyr Press in 2019.

Photo by Natasha Sajé

Lisa Katz, editor of the Israeli pages of the Poetry International Rotterdam Web, was translator in residence at the University of Iowa in fall 2017.

Photo by Ian Franzen

Jordan Katz specializes in early modern Jewish history. She completed her PhD at Columbia University and is currently the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Postdoctoral Associate at Yale. Next year she will begin a position as assistant professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Andrew Kaufman’s books include the Cinnamon Bay Sonnets, winner of the Center for Book Arts manuscript award; Earth’s Ends, winner of the Pearl Poetry Book Award; Both Sides of the Niger (Spuyten Duyvil Press); and The Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets (Rain Mountain Press). He is an NEA recipient.

Photo: Denise Noone

Catherine Kedala specializes in film studies and literature of the twentieth century and teaches Italian language and literature. She received a Global Citizen Award in 2014 and the 2017 Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Connecticut.

Jesse Lee Kercheval’s poetry collections include Dog Angel (University of Pittsburgh Press) and World as Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University Press). In May 2015 Editorial Yaugarú in Uruguay published her bilingual poetry collection Extranjera / Stranger. Her translations of the Uruguayan poet Circe Maia have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, Boston Review, and American Poetry Review. The University of Pittsburgh Press will publish Invisible Bridge / El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia in August 2015. Kercheval is also the editor of América invertida: An Anthology of Younger Uruguayan Poets, which is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press. She is the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she also directs the Program in Creative Writing

Sara Khalili is a financial journalist, editor, and translator of contemporary Iranian literature. She won a 2007 PEN Translation Fund Grant for her translation from the Farsi of Seasons of Purgatory, a selection of short stories by Iranian writer Shahriar Mandanipour.