About
Kelsi Vanada holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Her translations include The Visible Unseen by Andrea Chapela; Damascus, Atlantis: Selected Poems by Marie Silkeberg (longlisted for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation); Sergio Espinosa’s Into Muteness; and Berta García Faet’s The Eligible Age. Kelsi is also the author of the poetry chapbook Rare Earth. She works as the Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
Featured Work
The Visible Unseen
Andrea Chapela, one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists of 2021, breaks down literary and scientific conventions in this prize-winning collection of experimental essays exploring the properties and poetics of glass, mirrors, and light as a means of understanding the self--translated by Kelsi Vanada.
Other Works
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Damascus, Atlantis
2021
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Into Muteness
2020
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Rare Earth
2020
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The Eligible Age
2018
Awards and Recognition
- Translator for Granta's Best of Young Spanish Spanish-Language Novelists, 2021
- Longlisted for the 2021 John Dryden Translation Competition, September 2021 for “The Act of Self-seeing | Object of Study: Mirror” from The Visible Unseen (from Andrea Chapela’s Spanish text “El acto de verse | Objeto de estudio: Espejo” from Grados de miopía)
- Jules Chametzky Translation Prize Winner, Massachusetts Review, January 2020
- Shortlisted for the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute’s 2020 Poetry Translation Award for The Eligible Age, October 2019
- Honorable Mention 2018, Gulf Coast Prize in Translation
- Winner, 2018 American-Scandinavian Foundation Nadia Christensen Prize in Translation
- Shortlisted, Disquiet International Literary Prize 2018
- ALTA Travel Fellow, 2016
- 2016 Asymptote Close Approximations contest winner
