Each year, between four and six $1,000 Travel Fellowships are awarded to emerging (unpublished or minimally published) translators to help them pay for hotel and travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference. Included in these Fellowships is the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship, which is preferentially awarded to an emerging translator of color or a translator working from an underrepresented diaspora or stateless language. At the conference, ALTA Fellows are invited to read their translated work at a keynote event, giving them an opportunity to present their translations to an audience of translators, authors, editors, and publishers from around the world. Applications are being accepted this year until April 15.
This year, we are delighted to have Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, J. Kates, Sandra Kingery, and Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma as our Travel Fellowship judges! Learn more about them below:
Credit: Margarita Corporan
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and a Florida Book Award bronze medal, and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Award. She and E.J. Koh are co-translating the selected works of Korean poet Yi Won. She has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, among others. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, and more. She serves as a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair. www.marcicalabretta.com.
J. Kates is a minor poet, an award-winning literary translator and the co-director of Zephyr Press. He has been granted three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems and one full book, The Briar Patch(Hobblebush Books). He is also the translator of a dozen books of Russian and French poetry, has edited two anthologies of translations, and collaborated on a half dozen books of Latin American and Peninsular Spanish poetry in translation.
The Logan A. Richmond Professor of Spanish at Lycoming College, Sandra Kingery’s book-length translations include A Beard for Two and 99 Other Erotic Microfictions by Lawrence Schimel; Julia and Of My Real Life I Know Nothing by Ana María Moix; Politics in the Times of Indignation and A New Narrative for a New Europe by Daniel Innerarity; Welcome to Miami, Doctor Leal by René Vázquez Díaz; and Hudson and Metztli (with Kaitlyn Hipple) by Xánath Caraza.
Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma is an author, poet, translator, musician, magician, and lover of life. He was born in Seattle, Washington, has lived and worked in south India and southern Mexico, and is a 2018-2019 NEA Literary Translation Fellow. His first collection of poems, The Safety of Edges, was published in February. Other books include Give, Eat, and Live: Poems of Avvaiyar and Body and Earth: Notes from a Conversation (with the artist C.F. John). He makes his home on Vashon Island, Washington, with his husband, David Mielke. thomaspruiksma.com