Translators

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).

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.

Thom Satterlee has translated several works of Danish fiction and poetry, most recently If I Were a Suicide Bomber and Other Verses, by Per Aage Brandt (2018). His awards include two NEA Literature Fellowships (poetry and translation), the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize, and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. Photo by Sophie Stewart.

Mark Schafer is a literary translator, teacher, and visual artist who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Schafer’s most recent work is the bilingual anthology of David Huerta’s poetry, Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2009). Schafer has translated novels, short stories, essays, and poetry by a wide range of Latin American authors, including Virgilio Piñera, Gloria Gervitz, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Jesús Gardea, and Antonio José Ponte. He is the recipient of two NEA translation fellowships, the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize, and a grant from the Fund for Culture Mexico-USA. More information about Schafer’s translation work can be found at www.beforesaying.com; information about his visual art can be found at www.marksonpaper.us.

Rike Scheffler is a poet, musician, and artist based in Berlin, creating work at the intersection of language, music, and performance, spaces across media and art forms that one can inhabit. Rike’s poetry collection der rest ist resonanz (kookbooks, 2014) won the Orphil Debut Prize for political and Avantgarde writing.

Photo by Hernan Zenteno

Eric Schierloh was born in Buenos Aires in 1981. He is a writer, translator, and artisan publisher. He runs Barba de Abejas, a small artisan publishing house and letterpress workshop.

Lawrence Schimel is a bilingual author and literary translator based in Madrid, working in and between English and Spanish. His translations have won a PEN Translates Award from English PEN (three times) and the Cliff Becker Book Translation Award.

Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft was shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize in 2015, and her translation of Boullosa’s penultimate novel, The Book of Anna, was published by Coffee House Press in 2020. Her translation of Boullosa’s El libro de Eva, which was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prize, will be published by Deep Vellum in 2023.

Alec Schumacher is an assistant professor at Gonzaga University. His research interests include Chilean poetry, the neo-avant-garde, and translation. He has published several articles on the works of Juan Luis Martínez. He has translated works by Jorge Arbeleche, Elvira Hernández, and Luis Correa-Díaz. His translation of The Chilean Flag (2019) was nominated for the National Translation Award in Poetry 2020 by the American Literary Translators Association.

Leonard Schwartz’s recent books include The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press) and Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House).

Roger Sedarat is an Iranian American poet and translator. He is the author of two poetry collections: Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic and Ghazal Games.

Anthony Seidman is a poet and translator residing in Los Angeles. His work has been included in such journals as Chiron Review, Nimrod, World Literature Today, The Black Herald Review, Ambit, Cardinal Points, among other publications. He has a new collection of poetry entitled Cosmic Weather forthcoming from Eyewear. With David Shook, he is the co-translator of Confetti-Ash: Selected Poems by Salvador Novo, to be published later this year by the Bitter Oleander Press.

Eric Sellin, professor emeritus at Tulane University (New Orleans), now lives in Philadelphia. His translations have appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, including New Directions, The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Poetry, and The Literary Review. A frequent contributor to WLT, Sellin also served on the jury for the 1984 Neustadt Prize.

Grace Sewell is an honors Russian and Spanish double major at Swarthmore College and an emerging literary translator. She is also an alumna of the Yiddish Book Center’s 2021 Steiner Program and a 2020 Eugene M. Lang research fellow.

Fatemeh Shams’s third collection, When They Broke Down the Door, translated by Dick Davis, received the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award. She won the Jaleh Esfahani poetry prize for the best young Iranian poet in 2012.

Laura Shanahan is a postgraduate student in the MA in Literary Translation Studies program at the University of Warwick. She has worked in the publishing industry and as a freelance translator and editor. She lives in Oxford, where she previously studied French and Italian, spending a year abroad in Naples, Italy.

Bela Shayevich is a Soviet-American writer and translator.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Moazzam Sheikh writes and translates fiction in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, and English. He is author of two collections of short stories and was involved in founding the United States’ only South Asian literary press, Weavers Press.

Peter Sherwood taught at universities in the UK and US for more than forty years, retiring as distinguished professor of Hungarian language and culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. His translations from Hungarian have been appearing since the late 1960s. With his wife, Julia Sherwood, he also translates from Slovak and Czech.

Shook’s most recent book-length translations include Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Room in Rome, a finalist for the PEN Award. Their forthcoming books include a new translation of Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon and a collection of Spanish-language poetry, Atlas estelar.

Photo by Orna Itamar

Lyor Shternberg (b. 1967) is a poet, translator, and a teacher of literature. His seventh volume of poetry, The Bread, the Salt (collecting twenty years of writing), was published recently.

Antony Shugaar is a prolific translator, with new novels by Silvia Avallone, Gianrico Carofiglio, Diego De Silva, Giorgio Faletti, Gianni Rodari, and Paolo Sorrentino forthcoming in 2011. The recipient of a 2007 NEA translation fellowship, he is also the author of I Lie for a Living and Coast to Coast, and the coauthor of Latitude Zero: Tales of the Equator. His essay “Darkness at the Heart of Recent Italian Literature” appears in the July 2011 issue of WLT.

Yvette Siegert is a Latinx poet, translator, and Ledbury Critic currently completing a doctorate in Colombian literature and intellectual history at Merton College, University of Oxford. As a translator she has been a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and winnner of the Best Translated Book Award.

Andrew Simes (b. 1981) studied at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. Of the latest generation of a Levantine family that settled in Izmir, Turkey, in 1815, he has lived in Izmir for fifteen years and works as a freelance translator and English-language and IELTS tutor.

Daniel Simon is a poet, essayist, translator, and WLT’s assistant director and editor in chief. His most recent edited collection, Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2020), was nominated for a 2020 Foreword INDIES Award.

Nidhi Singh is a doctoral student in comparative literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her essays have appeared in The Kalahari Review and The Bangalore Review. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is the author of Bare Soul and three collections of poems in Hindi. Her work is widely published and translated into many languages.