2nd Annual Day of Translation with the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center

Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an Egyptian-American translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world who translates from Arabic, French, and German. He has received the Sarah Maguire Prize, PEN Center USA’s translation prize, Poetry Magazine’s translation prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and an NEA translation grant, among other honors, and has twice been a finalist for the PEN America Translation Prize (once in poetry and once in prose). He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice. He lives in the countryside just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Heather Green is the translator of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won (Octopus Books, 2018) and Guide to the Heart Rail, an art-edition with images by artist Pete Schulte (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2017) and the author of No Other Rome (Akron Poetry Series, 2021). Her writings and translations have appeared in AGNI, Hopscotch Translation, the New Yorker, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Green currently serves as a reviewer for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books and the Visual Editor for Asymptote. She is a poetry faculty member for the Cedar Crest Pan-European MFA and an Assistant Professor in the School of Art at George Mason.

Author of two full-length poetry collections: The Book of Funnels (Wave Books, 2005) and Citizen Of (Wave, 2007); four chapbooks: Hour Hour (Delirium Press, 2005), Petitions for an Alien Relative (Hand Held Editions, 2009), Ulf (Factory Hollow Press, 2010), and Sonette mit Elizabethanischem Maulwurf (hochroth verlag, 2010); the cross-genre book Ventrakl (2010, Ugly Duckling Presse); and (with Uljana Wolf) Sonne from Ort, a collaborative bilingual erasure (kookbooks verlag, Berlin, 2013); he has received a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award (2006) and a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellowship (2008); translates contemporary German-language poetry and prose.

Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from Arabic and Executive Director of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Minor Detail by Palestinian author Adania Shibli was shortlisted for the National Book Award and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Other translations include Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author Rania Mamoun, The Queue by Egyptian author Basma Abdel Aziz, and The Frightened Ones by Syrian author Dima Wannous. Elisabeth’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Words Without Borders, The Common, and World Literature Today, as well as a dozen anthologies. Formerly, she was Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association.

Megan McDowell has translated work by many of the most important contemporary Latin American writers, including Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, Carlos Fonseca, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN award for Writing in Translation, the Premio Valle-Inclán, the Shirley Jackson Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been short- or long-listed four times for the International Booker Prize, and shortlisted once for the Kirkus Prize. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. She is from Richmond, KY and lives in Santiago, Chile.

Anna Deeny Morales is a translator and literary critic. Recent translations include Floating Lanterns (Shearsman Books, 2015) by Mercedes Roffé and Sky Below: Selected Works by Raúl Zurita. Other translations of Zurita’s works include Purgatory (University of California Press, 2009) and Dreams for Kurosawa (arrow as aarow, 2012). She is an adjunct professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University.

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation—separately and in various combinations. Her books include The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), the translation of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls (UDP), The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), and Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry.

Vivek Narayanan holds an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. Narayanan has taught history, anthropology, and creative writing in many places, including the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. His books include Universal Beach (Harbour Line Press, 2006; In Girum Books, 2011) and Life and Times of Mr S (Harper Collins India, 2012). His essays, criticism, and poetry have appeared widely in Agni, Granta, The Village Voice, Harvard Review, Caravan, and elsewhere.

Marcia Lynx Qualey is the founding editor of ArabLit, an online magazine and resource that won the 2017 “Literary Translation Initiative” award at the London Book Fair. She writes, edits, and translates for a variety of newspapers and magazines, teaches writing in Morocco, and also works with a number of Arabic literature projects, including Kitab Sawti and the Library of Arabic Literature.

Lara Vergnaud is a translator of prose, creative nonfiction, and scholarly works from the French. Her translations include novels by Ahmed Bouanani, Zahia Rahmani, Mohamed Leftah, and Joy Sorman. Lara is the recipient of two PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants and a French Voices Grand Prize, and her translation of The Last One by Fatima Daas was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Alex Zucker’s translations include novels by J. R. Pick, Petra Hůlová, Jáchym Topol, Magdaléna Platzová, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. He has also translated stories, plays, young adult and children’s books, essays, subtitles, song lyrics, reportage, and poems. His translations of Petra Hůlová’s Three Plastic Rooms and Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop received Writing in Translation awards from English PEN, and he won the ALTA National Translation Award in 2010 for Petra Hůlová’s All This Belongs to Me. In addition to translating, Alex works in editing and communications. He lives in Brooklyn.