About

Kelsi Vanada is a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow, the author of the poetry chapbook Rare Earth, and the translator from Spanish of Basket of Braids by Natalia Litvinova, United Left by Álvaro Lasso, and The Visible Unseen by Andrea Chapela, among others. Her manuscript Antiphon was a finalist for Tupelo Press’s 2023 Dorset Prize. She works as the Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in Tucson, AZ.

Featured Work

The Visible Unseen

2022

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

  • United Left

    2024

  • Basket of Braids

    2024

  • 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