September 7, 2018—ALTA is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 ALTA Travel Fellowships, including the third annual Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship. Each year, ALTA provides four to six $1,000 fellowships to emerging translators to attend the annual ALTA conference. This year’s winners were selected by Marguerite Feitlowitz, Margarit T. Ordukhanyan, Emma Ramadan, and Haider Shahbaz. Congratulations to these exceptional emerging translators, chosen from more than 100 applications!
Mariam Rahmani, 2018 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow (Persian)
Mariam Rahmani writes fiction and non-fiction and also works on translation. Her current projects include a novel-in-progress and a translation from Persian/Farsi into English of Mahsa Mohebali’s Don’t Worry (2008), for which she was awarded a PEN/Heim translation grant in 2018. Learn more about Mariam here.
Elina Alter, 2018 ALTA Travel Fellow (Russian and German)
Elina Alter’s recent work appears in BOMB, The New England Review, The Paris Review Daily, Modern Poetry in Translation, Slice, and Guernica. She is the recipient of fellowships from ALTA, VIDA, and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, and the editor of Circumference, a journal of poetry in translation. Learn more about Elina here.
Lizzie Buehler, 2018 ALTA Travel Fellow (Korean)
Lizzie Buehler is a first-year MFA student in literary translation at the University of Iowa. Her translation from Korean of Table for One, by Yun Ko Eun, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Learn more about Lizzie here.
Aaron Robertson, 2018 ALTA Travel Fellow (Italian)
Aaron Robertson is a Detroit-born journalist and translator. He has written for The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point Magazine, and more. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s novel Beyond Babylon is forthcoming from Two Lines Press. He holds a MSt in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. Learn more about Aaron here.
Brian Sneeden, 2018 ALTA Travel Fellow (Greek)
Brian Sneeden is the author of the poetry collection Last City (Carnegie Mellon, 2018). His translation of Phoebe Giannisi’s Homerica (World Poetry Books, 2017) was selected by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017. A 2018 PEN/Heim recipient, Brian is a PhD student in poetry and translation studies at the University of Connecticut. Learn more about Brian here.
Maggie Zebracka, 2018 ALTA Travel Fellow (Polish)
Born in southeastern Poland, Maggie Zebracka received her BA from Wellesley College and her MFA from Vanderbilt University. She is currently an MFA student in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa where she is translating Joanna Bator’s 2014 novel, Dark, Almost Night (Ciemno, Prawie Noc), from the Polish. Her translations appear in The Arkansas International, Asymptote, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Drunken Boat. Learn more about Maggie here.
As part of ALTA41: Performance, Props, and Platforms, held October 31 – November 3, 2018 in Bloomington, IN, there will be a Fellows Reading to feature the work of these excellent Fellows. More information on the conference is available at http://www.literarytranslators.org/conference/alta41.
The mentor for the 2018 ALTA Travel Fellows is Elizabeth Harris.
The 2018 ALTA Travel Fellowships are made possible thanks to the generous support of ALTA’s Past Presidents Council, the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fund, and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. More details about the ALTA Travel Fellowships are available at http://literarytranslators.org/awards/alta-travel-fellowships.