2026 Faculty and Guests

Kazim Ali is the author of twenty-four books in multiple genres, including, most recently, Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton, winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, and Sukun: New and Selected Poems. He has translated books by Marguerite Duras, Ananda Devi, Mahmoud Chokrollahi, and Sohrab Sepehri. In addition to receiving the Ohioana Poetry Book Award in 2013 for Sky Ward, and the Banff Mountain Environmental Literature Award for Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, he was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award for Oasis of Now: Selected Poems by Sohrab Sepehri. In 2004, he founded the small press Nightboat Books, and served as its first publisher. He is currently a professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Arts and associate director of the Institute for Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego.

Damion Searls has translated sixty books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, including modern classics by Proust, Gide, and Nietzsche; Mann, Hesse, Walser, and Wittgenstein; Rilke, Jelinek, and Modiano; Victoria Kielland, Ariane Koch, and Nescio; and a dozen books by Jon Fosse. A Guggenheim, Cullman Center, and two-time NEA fellow, he edited Thoreau’s The Journal for NYRB Classics and is the author of The Inkblots: a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator. His latest books are The Philosophy of Translation and The Mariner’s Mirror, a poetry chapbook, and Analog Days, a novel.

Mónica de la Torre is the author of seven books of poetry, of which the most recent is Pause the Document. Others include Repetition Nineteen, which centers on experimental translation and The Happy End/All Welcome, a riff on a riff on Kafka’s Amerika. Among her books written in Spanish and published in her native Mexico City are Acúfenos (2007) and Taller de Taquimecanografía (2011), written with the eponymous artists’ collective she co-founded. She has translated poetry by authors such as Amanda Berenguer, Omar Cáceres, Ana Hatherly, Lila Zemborain, Gerardo Deniz, and Ana Cristina Cesar. Her co-edited anthologies include Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (2020), and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (2002). She is the recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant and teaches poetry and translation at Brooklyn College. 

Hosam Aboul-Ela is a writer, translator, and literary critic. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt and now teaches English at the University of Houston. The author of two books of criticism, his writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, Words without Borders, npr.com, Jadaliyya, the Houston Chronicle, the New York Times Magazine, and several academic journals. His latest translation is Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Warda.

Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. In 2023, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with her husband, cats, and twins.

Anton Hur is a Korean literary translator and the author of Toward Eternity. He was born in Stockholm and currently resides in Seoul. He won a PEN Translates grant for his translation of The Underground Village by Kang Kyeong-ae and a PEN/Heim grant for Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. His translation of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City was longlisted for the same prize in the same year. His translation of Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets and Lee Seong-bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence were longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. His other translations include Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki and a co-translation of Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS, which debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List, and the upcoming That Summer’s End by Lee Seong-Bok. He has taught at the British Centre for Literary Translation, the Ewha University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. Anton is a judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize.