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.

Nataša Ďurovičová divides her time between editing, teaching, scholarly work, and translating. She is the editor of International Writing Program’s imprint 91st Meridian Books, and its journal 91st Meridian. A co-editor of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (2010; the winner of SCMS's 2011 Best Edited Collection award) and At Translation's Edge (2019), she is one of the two translators of André Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema's Literary Imagination (2022). She runs IWP’s International Translation Workshop, and in 2023 co-curated the exhibit "A Hub, A Network, an Archive: 55 Years of International Writers in Iowa City."

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.

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. 

Kaija Straumanis is an award-winning translator from the Latvian, and editorial director at Open Letter Books. Her published translations include works by Inga Ābele, Zigmunds Skujiņš, Jānis Joņevs, and Gundega Repše, among others. Her current projects include FOREST DAUGHTERS (MEŽA MEITAS, ed. Sanita Reinsone), for which she received a 2020 NEA Literature in Translation fellowship, and THE RIVER by Laura Vinogradova (forthcoming next year from Open Letter Books), one of three titles in Open Letter’s 2024 Translator Triptych, which Straumanis also curated.

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).