Translators

Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma is an author, poet, performer, and teacher. His books include The Safety of Edges and Give, Eat, and Live: Poems of Avvaiyar. Pruiksma teaches writing for Cozy Grammar and has received grants and fellowships from the Valley Community of Writers, the US Fulbright Program, the American Literary Translators Association, and Oberlin Shansi.

Artem Pulemotov is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Queensland, Australia. He holds a PhD from Cornell and a bachelor’s degree from Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University.

Iqbal Qaisar is a historian and Punjabi poet. He has published two books of poetry and six nonfiction books in Punjabi and two books of history in Urdu. He is the director of Punjabi Kohj Garh, an institute promoting research in Punjabi history and culture.

Omar Qaqish is a teaching fellow in English at Le Moyne College in Syracuse and a doctoral candidate at McGill University. He teaches and researches literature by Arab authors writing in English, Arabic, French (and sometimes Italian).

Michelle Quay is currently visiting lecturer of Persian at Brown University. She holds a doctorate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, and her translation work has appeared in Words Without Borders, Two Lines, Asymptote, and eXchanges, among others.

Mahmud Rahman is a Bangladeshi writer and translator now based in California. His collection of stories Killing the Water appeared in 2010, and his translation of Mahmudul Haque’s Black Ice appeared in 2012. His article "Pulp Fiction in Bangladesh: Super Spies and Transplant Authors" appeared in the May 2008 issue of WLT.

Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez is a Seattle-based poet and translator born to Guatemalan immigrants. As a translator, she focuses on Indigenous literatures of Latin America, especially from Mesoamerica. Her translations of Rosa Chávez (Maya K’iche’ and Kaqchikel), with whom she regularly collaborates, appear in Poetry, Asymptote, and elsewhere.

Margaret Randall (b. 1936, New York) is a poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer, and social activist. She lived in Latin America for twenty-three years (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua). From 1962 to 1969 she and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón co-edited El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary quarterly that published some of the best new work of the sixties. When she came home in 1984, the government ordered her deported because it found some of her writing to be “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” With the support of many writers and others, she won her case in 1989. Randall’s most recent poetry titles include As If the Empty Chair / Como si la silla vacia, The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones, About Little Charlie Lindbergh, and She Becomes Time (all from Wings Press). Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led By Transgression (2015) and Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity (2017) were published by Duke. Randall has also devoted herself to translation, producing When Rains Become Floods, by Lurgio Galván Sánchez, and Only the Road / Solo el Camino, an anthology of eight decades of Cuban poetry (both also published by Duke). Randall lives in New Mexico with her partner (now wife) of more than thirty years, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels extensively to read, lecture, and teach.

At any given moment, words in three different languages were heard around the dinner table in writer Kristina Zdravič Reardon’s childhood. She finds that translating literature from her grandparents’ native Slovene and Spanish to English is a challenging—yet somehow natural—pursuit. Reardon holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and has been awarded a Fulbright translation grant and a summer fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Matt Reeck has won grants from the NEA, the Fulbright Foundation, and the PEN-Heim Fund. Forthcoming translations include Chamoiseau’s French Guiana: Memory-Traces of the Penal Colony and Zahia Rahmani’s “Muslim”: A Novel.

Gabi Reigh won the Stephen Spender Prize in 2017. She has also translated Poems of Light by Lucian Blaga and two novels by Mihail Sebastian.

Jamie Richards, currently a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Oregon, is the translator of several literary works from Italian, including Giancarlo Pastore's Jellyfish (2008), Nicolai Lilin's Free Fall (forthcoming in 2011), and Giovanni Orelli's Walaschek's Dream (forthcoming in 2012).

Wendell Ricketts is the editor of Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life. His fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Salt Hill, Blue Mesa Review, and The Long Story, among others. He holds a degree in creative writing from the University of New Mexico and has worked as a translator from Italian since 1998; his translation of the plays of Natalia Ginzburg, The Wrong Door, was published by the University of Toronto Press.

Frances Riddle has translated many Spanish-language authors including Isabel Allende, Claudia Piñeiro, Leila Guerriero, and Sara Gallardo. Her translation of Elena Knows, by Claudia Piñeiro, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Queen Sofía Translation Prize in 2022, and her translation of Theatre of War, by Andrea Jeftanovic, was granted an English PEN Award in 2020. Originally from Houston, Texas, she currently lives in Buenos Aires.

Cia Rinne was born in Sweden from a Finnish family and raised in Germany. Rinne has studied in Frankfurt am Main, Athens, and Helsinki. Rinne is the author of the books zaroum and notes for soloists as well as a collaborator on numerous multimedia and performance works.

Aaron Robertson is an editor at Literary Hub. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon (Two Lines Press, 2019) received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, n+1, Foreign Policy, and more.

Peter Robinson (b. 1953) is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading (UK). Among his many volumes of poetry, translation and literary criticism are Selected Poems (2003), The Look of Goodbye: Poems 2001–2006 (2008), Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (2006), The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007), winner of the John Florio Prize, Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (2010), and Antonia Pozzi, Poems (2011).

Lola Rogers is a translator living in Seattle. She has translated dozens of Finnish novels, short stories, poems, comics, and children’s books, including works by Sofi Oksanen, Antti Tuomainen, and Johanna Sinisalo. Her most recent translation is Juhani Karila’s novel Fishing for the Little Pike (2023).

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books and plays. His recent publications include a memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost (2024), and Irreverent Litanies (2019), his ninth book of poems. His most recent play, Colette Uncensored, had its first staged reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and ran in London, Indonesia, Catalonia, San Francisco, and Portland.

Rashi Rohatgi is a Pushcart-nominated writer and Pennsylvania native who lives and teaches in Norway. Her writing has appeared in, among other venues, The Toast, Midnight Breakfast, and Electric Literature. Rohatgi is a fiction reader for Waxwing and a Bread Loaf, VONA, and Tin House alumna. Her forthcoming novella, Sita in Exile, will be released in 2023 by Miami University Press.

Elazar Tal Ronen is a prolific musician, lyricist, and songwriter. A graduate with honors of CCNY in 2009, Ronen is a prominent member of the New York jazz scene. As a songwriter and lyricist, he’s collaborated on internationally praised albums.

Photo by Jamie Borland

Mira Rosenthal is the author of The Local World and translator of two books by Polish poet Tomasz Różycki. Her work has received numerous awards, including an NEA Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and the Northern California Book Award. She is assistant professor of poetry writing at Cal Poly.

Anna Rosenwong is a translator, editor, and content strategist. Her work has been honored with the Best Translated Book Award, the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, and an NEA fellowship. Her publications include Deuda Natal (Mara Pastor), Diorama (Rocío Cerón), and here the sun’s for real (José Eugenio Sánchez).

Chip Rossetti has a doctorate in modern Arabic literature from the University of Pennsylvania. His published translations include Beirut, Beirut, by Sonallah Ibrahim; Metro: A Story of Cairo, by Magdy El Shafee; and Utopia, by Ahmed Khaled Towfik. He is currently editorial director for the Library of Arabic Literature at NYU Press.

N. Harry Rothschild is a professor of Chinese history at the University of North Florida. His work focuses on China’s first and only female emperor, Wu Zhao.

Souradeep Roy is a translator, poet, and performer currently based in Delhi. Currently he works as part of the editorial collective of the Indian Writers’ Forum, which runs two sites: www.indianculturalforum.in and an online e-journal of culture, www.guftugu.in. His translations of Jibanananda Das have appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of Almost Island; of Phalguni Roy in The Sunflower Collective; and of contemporary Bengali poets in Guftugu as well as in Indian Literature, the English journal of Sahitya Akademi, the National Academy of Letters in India. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fulcrum, Quarterly Literary Review India, Muse India, Aainanagar, and The Missing Slate, among other places.

Mariah Rust is currently earning a master’s degree in translation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. She graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City in May 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in French literature and translation. Apart from being a now-published translator, Mariah is also an accomplished Scottish Highland dancer who has performed in France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Scotland, Russia, and China.

Mohammad Salama is professor and coordinator of the Arabic Program at San Francisco State University. His recent books include The Qur’an and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism: From Taha to Nasr (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Islam and the Culture of Modern Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Stephanie Sandler is Professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University. Her most recent critical monograph was Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet (2004). She has edited several collections of essays, including Rereading Russian Poetry (1999). Sandler collaborated with Genya Turovskaya in translating The Russian Version: Selected Poems of Elena Fanailova (2009) and is currently working on a book about contemporary Russian poetry.

Photo: José Arturo Ballester Panelli

Mayra Santos-Febres is the author of some twenty books of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, including the novels Sirena Selena, which was a finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, and, most recently, La amante de Gardel, winner of the Prix Littéraire International de L’Académie de la Pharmacie, France. A Guggenheim Fellow and recent writer-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency Program, she is the recipient of the Juan Rulfo Prize for short story, Puerto Rico’s National Literature Prize, and the Primavera Prize (Spain). Currently, Santos-Febres is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she directs the creative writing workshop and Sirena Writing Lab.