THE FUTURE OF TRANSLATION: A PARTY with Two Lines, The Literary Review & Arkansas International

Jennifer Grotz, Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, is the author of three books of poetry, Cusp, The Needle, and most recently, Window Left Open. Her poems and translations have appeared in New England Review, New York Review of Books, Poetry, Parnassus, and the Nation. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches poetry and translation at the University of Rochester.

Will Schutt is the award-winning author of Westerly (Yale Younger Poets Prize) and most recently the translator of My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (Oberlin College Press) and Fabio Pusterla’s Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems (Princeton University Press).

Kelsi Vanada’s translation of The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet was published in 2018 by Song Bridge Press. She holds MFAs in Poetry (Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and Literary Translation (University of Iowa). She translates from Spanish and collaboratively from Swedish, and her poems and translations have been published recently or are forthcoming in the Iowa Review, The Bennington Review, Court Green, and Anomaly. She is Program Manager of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).

Edward Gauvin has received prizes, fellowships, and residencies from PEN America, the NEA, the Fulbright program, Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, and the French Embassy. His work has won the John Dryden Translation prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and World Literature Today. The translator of eight works of prose fiction and over 300 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders. He is currently a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellow for his work on Pierre Bettencourt, whom he has written about at Weird Fiction Review.

Gregory Pardlo’s ​collection​ Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors​ include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review. Air Traffic, a memoir in essays, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Olivia E. Sears is a translator of Italian poetry and founder of the Center for the Art of Translation, where she edited the journal Two Lines for over a decade. Her translations of contemporary poet Mariangela Gualtieri have recently appeared in Arkansas International, Circumference, The Common, and Copper Nickel, among others. She is currently completing a manuscript of Gualtieri’s poetry in English, When I Wasn’t Dying.

Curtis Bauer is a poet (most recently American Selfie (Barrow Street Press, 2019)) and a translator of poetry and prose from the Spanish (most recently Image of Absence, by Jeannette Clariond (The Word Works). He teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.

Kate Whittemore translates from the Spanish. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Two Lines, Gulf Coast Online, and The Arkansas International. She is translating Sara Mesa’s novel Four by Four for Open Letter Books. A graduate of the University of New Hampshire, Cambridge University, and Middlebury College, she now lives in Valencia, Spain.

Jeffrey Angles is a poet, translator, and professor at Western Michigan University. His collection of Japanese-language poetry won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. His translations of feminist and queer writers from Japan have won numerous awards. Among his recent translations are the feminist writer Itō Hiromi’s contemporary classic The Thorn Puller, the queer poet Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetry collection Only Yesterday, and the science-fiction author Kayama Shigeru’s 1950s novels Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again.

Aaron Coleman is a poet, translator, and scholar of the African Diaspora. He is the author of Red Wilderness (Four Way Books, 2025) and the translator of Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Coleman’s other poetry collections include Threat Come Close (Four Way Book, 2018), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. He is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the Helen Zell Writers’s Program at the University of Michigan.

Mónica de la Torre’s books include Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat) and The Happy End/All Welcome (UDP), as well as Public Domain, Talk Shows, and two books in Spanish, Acúfenos and Sociedad Anónima. She is the translator of Defense of the Idol (UDP) by Chilean modernist Omar Cáceres, and co-editor of Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon Press), and is a member of the editorial board of the Señal series at Ugly Duckling Presse. Born and raised in Mexico City, she has lived in New York City since the 1990s. She is a contributing editor to BOMB Magazine where she previously worked as a Senior Editor, and teaches poetry at Brooklyn College.