About
Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish-to-English literary translator. In addition to her translation of Catalina Infante’s debut novel, The Cracks We Bear (World Editions, 2025), her work appears in the anthologies Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024) and Daughters of Latin America (HarperCollins, 2023), as well as in venues such as World Literature Today, Southwest Review, and Latin American Literature Today. Her translation of Belén Fernández Llanos’s novel, Your Mother is the Rain, is forthcoming in 2027. A former ALTA travel fellow, she holds an MA in Translation and Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute and currently teaches in the Applied Spanish Language and Culture Graduate Certificate program at the University of Indianapolis. She is an editor-at-large for Hopscotch Translation. Find her work at www.michellemirabella.com.
Featured Work
The Cracks We Bear
What opens as a story on matrescence reveals itself to be an exploration of memory,
trauma, and grief—personal, familial, and national—as the protagonist, Laura,
struggling in her new motherhood, revisits stories from her own daughterhood and
coming of age in a home, in a country, where the adults are still living with the
trauma they experienced under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Borrowing
elements of a Bildungsroman observed through the sieve of memory, the story
recounts the past from the present through short, vignette-like chapters, pulling from
the Latin American literary tradition of the short story, that come together like a
reconstructed vase bearing its cracks.
