Kelsi Vanada

Kelsi Vanada is a poet and translator from Spanish and Swedish. Her book-length translations include Damascus, Atlantis: Selected Poems by Marie Silkeberg (Terra Nova Press, 2021), which was longlisted for the 2022 PEN Poetry in Translation Award; as well as Into Muteness by Sergio Espinosa (Veliz Books, 2020) and The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet (Song Bridge Press, 2018). Her translations of Mexican writer Andrea Chapela’s work have previously appeared in Granta 155: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2, Tupelo Quarterly, and the Brooklyn Rail InTranslation. She published Rare Earth, a chapbook of original poems, in 2020 (Finishing Line Press). 

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Poetry, Kelsi got her start as a literary translator at the International Writing Program in Iowa City and went on to get an MFA Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Among her awards are the 2021 John Dryden Translation Award longlist and the 2018 American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize. Kelsi actively publishes reviews of literature in translation to build a readership for translated work, and she designs and teaches workshops on literary translation and reviewing, including for the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Catapult, and the Kenyon Review. Since 2018, Kelsi has worked as Program Manager of the American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, Arizona.

Books