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 Sergio Espinosa’s Into Muteness (Veliz Books, 2020) and Berta García Faet’s The Eligible Age (Song Bridge Press, 2018), and she is the author of the poetry chapbook Rare Earth (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Kelsi is the Program Manager of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
Featured Work
Rare Earth
Kelsi Vanada’s poems shine like small, powerful talismans discovered in the weedy tangle of back-yard ground. From the bits and snags of memory, of a family’s immigration lore, of collected material evidence—photographs, property deeds, 8mm home movies—these poems build their enigmatic structures: a lean-to, a boundary line, a “done defected thing.” Wild, complicating syntax, fibers of vision and of hope fret through them.
–Emily Wilson, author of The Great Medieval Yellows
Other Works
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Damascus, Atlantis
2021
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Into Muteness
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
