Day of Translation 2025

Jhumpa Lahiri, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. 

Katie Kitamura is the bestselling author of A Separation and Intimacies, one of The New York Times’ “10 Best Books of 2021.” Known for her elegant prose that asks powerful questions about morality, identity, and narrative, her work has been translated into 21 languages and is being adapted for film and television. In her talks on fiction and identity, she delves into language, the immigrant experience, and finding her voice as a writer.

Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer in NYC whose work explores diasporic poetics, experimental translation, and virtual performance. Her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. A 2024 NEA Translation Fellow, Stine is the author of SMMER CRSH (Sarabande Books, 2025) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press, 2025).

Susan Bernofsky, one of the preeminent translators of German-language literature, directs the program Literary Translation at Columbia in the MFA Writing Progam at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Among her many published translations are Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, which won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the small masterpieces of Robert Walser.

Bonnie Chau is a writer and translator from Southern California. Her short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood was a finalist for a 2019 CLMP Firecracker Award, and her writing has appeared in Flaunt, Two Lines, Fence, Bennington Review, Black Sun Lit, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction and literary translation, and has received fellowships from Kundiman, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, Black Mountain Institute, and the Stadler Center. She edits at Public Books, the Evergreen Review, and 4Columns; teaches creative writing and translation; and serves on the boards of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and Art Farm Nebraska.

Anelise Chen is the author of the novel So Many Olympic Exertions, a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a 5 Under 35 Honoree from the National Book Foundation. Her most recent book, Clam Down: A Metamorphosis, published in June 2025, is a memoir about a woman who turns into a clam during a painful separation. Chen is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Columbia University. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her family.

Elisha Cohn is Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University and author of Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of The Contemporary Novel (2025), Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016), and essays, most recently appearing in Public Books and Post-45 Contemporaries.

Eirill Alvilde Falck is a Norwegian-born writer and translator who lives in the United States. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, and the anthology Best Literary Translations. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she was later a Zell Fellow. She was a 2020-2022 Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa, where she completed a master’s degree in Literary Translation. While at the University of Iowa, she received the Stanley Award for International Research for her work on translations of Edvard Munch’s journals. She is the recipient of the John Wagner Prize and the Hopwood Award, and has received support from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Eirill is the co-founder of MQR: Mixtape, an imprint of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity and the translator of various works of Korean literature into English including the National Book Award-finalist Cursed Bunny and the Dublin Literary Award-longlisted Love in the Big City. He resides in Seoul.

Chenxin Jiang (she/her) translates from Italian, German, and Chinese. Her most recent translation is for now I am sitting here growing transparent by Yau Ching for Zephyr Press. Other books include the PEN/Heim-winning The Cowshed by Ji Xianlin for New York Review Books and Tears of Salt by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta for MacLehose and Norton, shortlisted for the Italian Prose in Translation Award. Chenxin grew up in Hong Kong and is now based in Denver; she serves as president of the board for the American Literary Translators Association.

Khaled Rajeh is a writer and literary translator from Baakleen, Lebanon. His essays and translations have appeared in ArabLit, Vagabond City, 91st Meridian, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. He holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where he is pursuing a PhD.

Parisa Saranj is a writer and Persian translator. Her literary translations have appeared in various print and online journals, including Los Angeles Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Faultline, Asymptote, and Two Lines. She has also translated two books, Empty and Me: A Tale of Loss and Friendship (Lee & Low, 2023) by Azam Mahdavi and Women, Life, Freedom: Our Fight for Human Rights and Equality in Iran (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Nasrin Sotoudeh and two documentaries, Nasrin (2020) and Sansur (2023), on women’s rights in Iran.

Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese Hakka writer and a translator translating between Mandarin, French, Spanish, and English. Her translations and essays are published in The Paris Review, Lit Hub, Fare Magazine, Latin American Literature Today, AAWW, McSweeney’s, Catapult, and elsewhere. Her interviews can be found at World Literature Today, The Sunrise Times, Okapi, Openbook, and Words Without Borders. Her translations include works from Taiwanese feminist authors, Lin Yi-Han (Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise), Lâu Tsí-û (“Not Your Child”), Leah Yang, and more. She has given talks about translation, languages, and gender movements across 25 universities in the United States, Canada, China, and Taiwan.

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Animal Stories, a collection on zoos and Kafka, part of Transit Books’ Undelivered Lectures series. A paperback of The Light Room is also forthcoming from Transit. Two novels, Foam and Performance Art, are forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in 2026 and 2027. They are a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at NYU.