About

Kelsi Vanada is the author of the poetry collection Optional Saint (Bench Editions, 2025) and the chapbook Rare Earth, and a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow. She is the translator from Spanish of Day's Fortune by Carlo Acevedo, Basket of Braids by Natalia Litvinova, United Left by Álvaro Lasso, and The Visible Unseen by Andrea Chapela, among others. She works as the Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in Tucson, AZ.

Featured Work

Optional Saint

2025

The witty, playful poems in Optional Saint stretch sound to sound as they probe the intersections of creativity, translation, religion, and sexuality with curiosity and elasticity, asking: What do we inherit through family, language, and tradition, and what do we create anew? What happens when the sacred and profane collide? Here, nothing is fixed or reasonable, and transformation is an unending process: “A poem is only true in the moment, / and not in the next one."

Other Works

  • Day's Fortune

    2025

  • United Left

    2024

  • Basket of Braids

    2024

  • The Visible Unseen

    2022

  • Damascus, Atlantis

    2021

  • Into Muteness

    2020

  • Rare Earth

    2020

  • The Eligible Age

    2018

Awards and Recognition

  • 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship
  • Sundial Literary Translation Award 2024
  • 2023 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize Finalist for Antiphon, a manuscript of poems, judged by Shane McCrae
  • Commendation in the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation 2023
  • Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts writing residency recipient, Nov-Dec 2022
  • Longlisted for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Damascus, Atlantis
  • 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