Bennington Translates

2021

MARGUERITE FEITLOWITZ is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. Acclaimed internationally, it was a New York Times Notable Book and Notable Paperback, as well as a finalist for the PEN New England-L.L. Winship Prize. The book is published in Spanish (Buenos Aires: Ed. Prometeo); excerpts, in translation, have appeared in France, Israel and Spain. She has published five volumes of literary translations from French and Spanish, including, most recently, Small Bibles for Bad Times: Selected Prose and Poetry by Liliane Atlan. She has also published translations of fiction, plays and poetry by Luisa Valenzuela, Griselda Gambaro, and Salvador Novo. A 2019 NEA Fellow, she is currently translating the work of Chilean poet Ennio Moltedo. Her fiction, poetry, essays, art criticism, and translations have appeared in Bomb, InTranslation @Brooklyn Rail, 91 St Meridian TriQuarterly, Salmagundi, Les Temps Modernes, el viejo topo, City Lights Review, The Literary Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and numerous other journals and anthologies in the Americas, Europe, and Israel. Feitlowitz has held two Fulbright Fellowships to Argentina (including a Senior Scholar Award), a Bunting Fellowship in nonfiction, and a Harvard Faculty Research Grant. She was a visiting scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At Bennington, she has taught literature, writing, and literary translation since 2002, and is the founding director of Bennington Translates, which brings acclaimed literary, humanitarian, and scholarly translators to campus, and sponsors (M)othertongues, a student-created website publishing multilingual, multicultural literary, art and performance pieces.

JEN HOFER is a poet, translator, interpreter, educator, book-maker, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena Aire and the language justice advocacy collective Antena Los Ángeles. Jen has received fellowships and awards from CantoMundo, the Academy of American Poets, the City of Los Angeles, the NEA, and PEN American Center, and is the 2021 visiting Holloway Professor in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. They publish poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, belladonna, Counterpath Press, Kenning Editions, Insert Press, Les Figues Press, Litmus Press, LRL Textile Editions, NewLights Press, Palm Press, Subpress, Ugly Duckling Presse, and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. Jen's most recent books are translations by Mexican writers Dolores Dorantes (Kenning Editions), Myriam Moscona (Les Figues Press), and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez (Ugly Duckling Presse); translations of Uruguayan poet Virginia Lucas will be published in 2021 by Litmus Press. Between Language and Justice: Selected Writings from Antena Aire will be published in 2021 by The Operating System.

SAWAKO NAKAYASU  is an artist working with language, performance, and translation—separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From, Pink Waves (forthcoming), The Ants, Texture Notes, and the translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals, a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor, with Eric Selland, of an anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry (forthcoming). She teaches at Brown University in the Department of Literary Arts.

MONA KAREEM is a writer, literary scholar and literary translator working between Arabic and English. She is the author of three poetry collections, and most recently, the trilingual chapbook “Femme Ghosts.” She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is a Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University. Her translations include Octavia Butler’s Kindred into Arabic (Takween Publishing); Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within (The Operating System), longlisted for the BTBA 2017 awards; and Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s selected poems, Except for This Unseen Thread.

EMMA RAMADAN is a translator of poetry and prose from French. She is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a Fulbright. Her translations include Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying, Anne Garréta’s In Concrete and Sphinx, Kamel Daoud’s Zabor, or the Psalms, and a co-translation of Marguerite Duras’s Me & Other Writing.

2018

BASMA ABDEL AZIZ is a psychiatrist, writer, and sculptor. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is the author of several works of nonfiction. In 2016 she was named one of Foreign Policy's Global Thinkers for her debut novel, The Queue, which was also named to the longlist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award.  

KATRINA DODSON is the translator from the Portuguese of The Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector (New Directions, 2015), winner of the PEN Translation Prize and other awards. Dodson has taught at UC Berkeley, Bard College, and most recently in the Mills College MFA in Translation Program. She was the Fall 2018 Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa.

ILAN STAVANS is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American, and Latino Culture at Amherst College, publisher of Restless Books, host of the NPR podcast In Contrast, and columnist for the New York Times en Español. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Stavans’ work has been translated into twenty languages and adapted into theater, TV, radio, and film.

2017

ESTHER ALLEN is a former fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Allen is currently working on a biography about José Martí, the founding father of Cuban political consciousness. Her most recent translation, Zama, a 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the top 20 fiction works published in 2016.

PETER CONSTANTINE is a Guggenheim Fellow and has translated work by Rousseau, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Voltaire. He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov.

ELIOT WEINBERGER has translated Chinese poetry and Latin American literature, including The Poems of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions. His work regularly appears in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

AARON COLEMAN is the author of the chapbook St. Trigger, which won the 2015 Button Poetry Prize, and his first full-length collection, Threat Come Close, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in March 2018. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in Washington University St. Louis’ Comparative Literature PhD program.

ELISABETH JAQUETTE is an adjunct instructor of Arabic translation at Hunter College-CUNY and is the managing director of the American Literary Translators Association. Her translation of The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz, won the English PEN Translates Award and was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. 

2016

SUSAN HARRIS is the editorial director of Words without Borders and the coeditor with Ilya Kaminsky of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. She was previously director and editor in chief at Northwestern University Press, where she founded the Hydra imprint of literature in translation and published Imre Kertész and Herta Müller before their Nobel Prizes in literature.

JOHN C. PEACOCK is an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation. He collaborated with tribal elders to produce the first dual-language translation of fifty letters written in the endangered Dakota language by three dozen Dakota prisoners of war incarcerated at Fort McClellan, Davenport, Iowa. Since 1986, he has taught at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where in addition to studio and criticism classes, he also teaches Native American Studies.

SARAH PONICHTERA currently works as the Project Manager of the Vilna Collections Digital Initiative, a seven-year project which aims to digitize the pre-war archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, currently held in both New York and Lithuania. She was a Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center in 2013, and has served as an editor of the Texts and Translations section of In Geveb, an online Yiddish scholarly publication, since 2014. 

REBECCA PETRAS is Deputy Director of Translators without Borders. In 2013 she developed TWB’s Words of Relief, the first-ever global crisis translation network. Words of Relief was piloted in Kenya and has subsequently been deployed in West Africa, Burundi, Nepal, and Europe for the refugee crisis. 

2015

ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC is a pioneering translator of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian literature, whose work has won numerous international awards. Also a scholar and author, she was for five years a translator at the United Nations Ad Hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

MARJORIE BANCROFT is the founder of Voices of Love (VOL), the first interpreting and translation agency devoted to helping survivors of torture, displacement, rape, and other crimes arising in conflict zones. VOL is instrumental in asylum hearings, trials, and clinical settings and has developed the first training programs in this new specialty.

CHAD POST is the Founding Director of Open Letter Books and the Three Percent blog, based at the University of Rochester. JENNIFER ZOBLE is a writer and Bosnian translator, the Co-Editor-in-Chief of InTranslation, and an editor at Brooklyn Rail. She teaches at NYU.

LUKE MOGELSON ’05 has won numerous awards for articles from the war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere. The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, and other journals have published his fiction.

HABIB ZAHORI, currently a Fulbright Scholar in the U.S., interpreted in his native Afghanistan for Mogelson, Dexter Filkins, Steve Coll, and other preeminent reporters for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications of record.

EDUARDO BERINSTEIN is the founder of ebtranslations. He served as the Director of Interpreting Services at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston and as a translator and interpreter at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Berinstein was instrumental in developing the first Standards of Practice for Medical Interpreters for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which were later adopted nationwide.

JEFFREY YANG, recipient of a 2014 NEA Translation Fellowship, has published three collections of original poetry. He translates ancient and contemporary Chinese and is an editor at New Directions.