Aron Aji, Director of MFA in Literary Translation, has joined the faculty in 2014. A native of Turkey, he has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, LatifeTekin, and other Turkish writers, including Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats, and A Long Day’s Evening. His forthcoming translations include Ferid Edgü’s Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, and Mungan’s Tales of Valor (co-translated with David Gramling). Aji was president of The American Literary Translators Association between 2016-2019.  He leads the Translation Workshop, and teaches courses on retranslation, poetry and translation; theory, and contemporary Turkish literature.

Adrienne is an interdisciplinary scholar, translator, and writer. Her academic work focuses primarily on Latin, Greek, and Classical Chinese languages and literatures with special emphasis on the poetics of retranslation, experimental, intersemiotic, multimodal translation practices, east-west cross-cultural literary studies, translation and humanitarian crises, and world literatures. She is also interested in book arts and the intersections of material culture and reading. From time to time, she writes a column on translation, poetry, and classics for the Society for Classical Studies’ blog.

Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint Press, 2017). He holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona and is an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps, as well as a fiction editor at DIAGRAM. He translates from Brazilian Portuguese and is originally from New York.

Jan is a translator and critic of literature written in Afrikaans, Dutch, English, and French. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. His academic work focuses on translation theory, critical contemporaneity, and world literature. He is the editor of Translation: Crafts, Contexts, Consequences (Cambridge University Press 2022). And he is currently working on a monograph entitled World Literature for the Times: How Translations and Adaptations Create Contemporaneity. 

Diana Thow is a literary translator and scholar working from Italian. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley (2020) and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa (2008).  Her academic research areas include Translation Studies, translation pedagogy, poetry and poetics, gender and translation, the translator's archive, Italian, French, and Anglophone literatures from the 19th century to the present and her publications include “Translation Pedagogy in the Literature Classroom: Close Reading and the Hermeneutic Model of Translation,” in L2 Journal: The Future of Translation in Higher Education (Fall 2021). She is currently at work on a book project about translations of poetry by women in Italy and the USA during the 1930s and 40s. As a literary translator she has received a Best Translated Book Award, and her publications include Close To The Teeth by Elisa Biagini, translated with Sarah Stickney, Autumn Hill Books (2021) and Hospital Series by Amelia Rosselli, Otis/Seismicity Books (2017).