Translators

Lydia Platón Lázaro is an independent professor in the English department at UPR Cayey. She has published two books: Defiant Itineraries: Caribbean Paradigms in American Dance and Film (2015) and El cuarto acto (2005) with visual artist Paloma Todd. In addition to her academic work, she is a translator, community arts promoter, and performer.

Kevin M. F. Platt is a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on Russian poetry, history, and memory in Russia and eastern Europe, global russophone culture, and translates contemporary Russian poetry. He is the editor of Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin, 2019). His new book, Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press / Northern Illinois University Press in 2023.

Kevin M. F. Platt is a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on Russian poetry, history, and memory in Russia and eastern Europe, global russophone culture, and translates poetry from Russian and Latvian. His new book, Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders, is forthcoming in 2023.

Jacquelyn Pope’s first collection of poems, Watermark, was published by Marsh Hawk Press; Hungerpots, her translation of the Dutch poet Hester Knibbe, was published by Eyewear. She is the recipient of a 2015 NEA Translation Fellowship and a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.

Jean-Jacques Poucel is the author of Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory (2006) and has written articles on the Oulipo, some of which appear in Pereckonings (Yale French Studies 105), Constrainted Writing I & II (Poetics Today 30.4 & 31.1), and in the Oulipo dossier at www.DrunkenBoat.com (issue 8). His translations of Emmanuel Hocquard's Conditions of Light (2010) and Anne Portugal's Flirt Formula (2012) have both been published by La Presse (Fence Books). In 2011–2012 he was a Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, Cologne, Germany. He is currently visiting faculty at the University of Calgary and at the University of Paris VII–Denis Diderot. 

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.