2027 Faculty and Guests

Madhu H. Kaza was born in Andhra Pradesh, India, and works in New York City as a writer, translator, artist, and educator. She is the author of Lines of Flight and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores connections between translation and migration. She is a translator of contemporary Telugu women writers, including Volga and Vimala. Her guest curation of writing from less translated languages appeared as a special feature in the Summer/Fall 2022 issue of Gulf Coast, and she served as a 2021 juror for the National Book Awards. Her work has appeared in Granta, the Yale Review, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, Two Lines, Chimurenga, and more. She worked for several years for the Bard Prison Initiative, and currently teaches in the MFA Writing program at Columbia University.

Matvei Yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor. His translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (with Eugene Ostashevsky), winner of the 2014 National Translation Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, and Civitella Ranieri. His co-translation (with John High) of Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. He is editor of World Poetry Books, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation, and teaches translation at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Geoffrey Brock is the author of three collections of poems, the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, prose, and comics, mostly from Italian. His poems and translations have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Paris Review, and Yale Review, as well as in the Best American Poetry and Best Literary Translations anthologies. His awards include ALTA’s National Translation Award for Poetry and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Cullman Center. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.

Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She has been awarded translation grants from the NEA and English PEN, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations and co-translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and Kaoru Takamura. She maintains the database Japanese Literature in English and is a member of the collective Strong Women, Soft Power.

Padma Viswanathan’s books have been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and others. Her most recent novel is The Charterhouse of Padma (2024). Her translations from Brazilian Portuguese include On Earth As It Is Beneath, by Ana Paula Maia (2025), shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She is also co-editor, with Daniel Hahn, of the forthcoming Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories. Canadian by birth and temperament, she is now a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville.

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of two collections of poetry, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (2017) and High Desert (2022), as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (2020). His poems have been translated into Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Latvian, Romanian, and Spanish. He received the Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 2026. In addition to his poetry, he has translated works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdellatif Laâbi, Rachid Boudjedra, Frankétienne, Ribka Sibhatu, Alessandro Spina, and Fabio Franzin, several of which were selected as ‘Books of the Year’ publications, including NPR, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. His critical publications include the monograph, Michael Hofmann: An Extended Passport Application (2025), as well as the co-edited volumes, Mick Imlah: Selected Prose (2015), and The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (2013). He is an Assistant Professor of English, French and Italian at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches on the MFA Program in Creative Writing.