Pshtewan Kamal Babakir is an archivist, filmmaker, and translator at Kashkul.

Rachel Tzvia Back is a poet and translator residing in the Galilee. Her Ruebner collection, In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner (Hebrew Union College Press / University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), was a finalist in 2015 for both the National Translation Award and the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. (Click here to read the WLT review.) Her essay “ ‘A Species of Magic’: The Role of Poetry in Protest and Truth-telling” appeared in the May 2014 issue of WLT.

Bryar Bajalan is an MA student in Middle East Studies at the University of Exeter, where he studies changing depictions of eroticism in the literature of Mosul before and after the Islamic State’s occupation. To the Ends of the Earth, his short documentary about nineteenth-century Baghdadi poet Jamil al-Zahawi, will premiere at the Translating Poetries Symposium this month in London.

Linda Frazee Baker’s (lindafrazeebaker.com) translations of works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch, and Ödön von Horváth have appeared in the Guardian, Asymptote, Metamorphoses, Web Conjunctions, the Brooklyn Rail, and New England Review (forthcoming). She is assistant editor at No Man’s Land: New German Literature in English Translation.

Benjamin Balint is the translator of Hagit Grossman’s Trembling of the City (2015) and the author of Kaf ka’s Last Trial, forthcoming from Norton. He lives in Jerusalem.

Aida Bamia is Palestinian American and a retired faculty member at the University of Florida, where she taught Arabic language and literature, covering the Middle East and North Africa.

José Bañuelos-Montes is an associate professor of Spanish at Roanoke College. He has translated Jesús J. Barquet’s El libro del desterrado (momentos robados: 1983–1991) / The Emigrant’s Logbook (Stolen Moments: 1983–1991) and is currently translating the Brazilian poet Narlan Matos.

Ibtisam Barakat is a Palestinian-American poet, artist, and the author of award-winning books in English and Arabic, including Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood (FSG) and Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine (FSG/Macmillan). Her most recent book, The Lilac Girl, won the 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award. 

Dara Barnat’s poetry, translations, and essays can be found in numerous journals. She is author of In the Absence (2016), and holds a PhD from Tel Aviv University, where she is Writing Director in the Department of English and American Studies.

Polina Barskova is a poet and scholar who teaches Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of twelve collections of poetry and two books of prose in Russian as well as of the monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (2017). Her recent creative nonfiction collection, Living Pictures (2022), was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize. Her collections of poetry in English translation include This Lamentable City, The Zoo in Winter, Relocations, and, most recently, Air Raid.

Kaveh Bassiri’s translations received a 2019 NEA fellowship and can be found in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, and Massachusetts Review.

Curtis Bauer is is the author of three poetry collections and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond’s Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for the “Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English.” He teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.

Kurt Beals is an assistant professor of German at Washington University in St. Louis. He has translated such authors as Anja Utler, Regina Ullmann, and Reiner Stach.

Photo by Luisa Leme

Eric M. B. Becker is an award-winning literary translator and journalist and editor of Words Without Borders. In 2014 he earned a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of a short-story collection by Mia Couto. In 2016 he earned a Fulbright fellowship to translate Brazilian literature. He holds an MFA from Queens College–City University of New York and currently lives in Brazil.

Susan Becker has worked as a writer, graphic designer, editor, and, for the past twenty years, as an oral historian, specializing in regional oral history, increasing accessibility of oral histories, and training oral historians. As an editor, she has worked for both academic and trade book publishers.

Gabriella Bedetti studied translation at the University of Iowa and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her translations of Meschonnic’s essays and other writings have appeared in New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, and Diacritics. Meschonnic was a guest of the MLA at her roundtable with Ralph Cohen and Susan Stewart.

Fiona Bell is a literary translator and scholar of russophone literature. Her translation of Stories, by Nataliya Meshchaninova, received a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. Her essays have appeared in Asymptote, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

John Bengan’s translations of Elizabeth Joy Serrano-Quijano’s work have appeared or are forthcoming in Words Without Borders, Shenandoah, and LIT. He teaches at the University of the Philippines Mindanao. 

Anna Bentley has translated a range of Hungarian writing, including Ervin Lázár’s children’s classic Arnica, the Duck Princess; Anna Menyhért’s Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers; an inclusive collection of rewritten fairy tales edited by Boldizsár M Nagy, A Fairytale for Everyone; and István Orosz’s short-story collection The Extra Horn. Anna’s poetry translations have appeared in Hungarian Literature Online, Continental Magazine, and Panodyssey. She is currently working on Zoltán Halasi’s Road to the Empty Sky.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a poet, writer, translator, and political science scholar. He is the author of The Town Slowly Empties: On Life and Culture during Lockdown (Headpress, 2021), Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India (Speaking Tiger, 2018), and Ghalib’s Tomb and Other Poems (The London Magazine, 2013). His writings, apart from regular contributions to The Wire, have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, World Literature Today, The Hindu, The Indian Express, and Outlook, among others.

Melissa D. Birkhofer (b. 1977, Iowa City, Iowa) is a settler-scholar and visiting assistant professor in the English Department at Appalachian State University. 

Julia Bloch is Assistant Professor at the Bard College MAT program in Delano, California, and an editor of the online poetics journal Jacket2. She grew up in northern California and Sydney, Australia, and received her PhD in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book Letters to Kelly Clarkson is forthcoming from Sidebrow Books; she has published poems recently in Aufgabe, P-Queue, and Peacock Online Review.

Sarit Blum has spent her life investigating body-mind techniques. Her fascination lies with the universal chord of human emotion.

Don Boes is the author of Good Luck with That, Railroad Crossing, and The Eighth Continent, selected by A. R. Ammons for the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the Louisville Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, CutBank, Zone 3, Southern Indiana Review, and Cincinnati Review.

Don Bogen is the author of five books of poetry and the translator of Europa: Selected Poems of Julio Martínez Mesanza (Diálogos, 2016).

David Boyd is associate professor of translation and Japanese studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated fiction by Hiroko Oyamada (The Factory, 2019; The Hole, 2020; and Weasels in the Attic, 2022), Toh EnJoe (Harlequin Butterfly, 2024), and Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (Takaoka’s Travels, 2024).

Philip Bradshaw graduated from the University of Kansas in 2018 with a double major in Chinese language and literature and biochemistry.

David Brookshaw is an emeritus professor at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published widely in the field of Brazilian and lusophone postcolonial studies. His translations include, most recently, Mia Couto’s Confession of the Lioness and Pensativities and Other Interinventions: Selected Essays, both forthcoming in spring 2015. His translation of Couto’s “In Some Other Life I Was a Bird” appears on page 53.

Susan Brown (b. 1968, New Orleans) is a Paris-based American translator.

Sarah Brownsberger’s poetry appears in Field, the Hudson Review, OnEarth, Poetry East, Salamander, and other journals. Her Icelandic-English translations include Sigfús Bjartmarsson’s bestiary, Raptorhood (Uppheimar, 2007); Harpa Árnadóttir’s artist’s diary, June (Crymogea, 2011); critical essays; and fiction and poetry for the unesco Reykjavík Literary City project.