About
Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish-to-English literary translator dedicating much of her work to translating Latin American women writers including Catalina Infante Beovic, Belén Fernández Llanos, Arianna de Sousa-García, and Dainerys Machado Vento, among others. Winner of the 2026 Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award for her translation of Infante’s The Cracks We Bear (World Editions), her work also appears in the anthologies Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum) and Daughters of Latin America (HarperCollins), as well as in venues such as World Literature Today, Southwest Review, and Latin American Literature Today, with more forthcoming. A 2026 ALTA Travel Fellowship Judge and former ALTA Travel Fellow, she holds an MA in Translation and Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute and is an editor-at-large for Hopscotch Translation. More 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.
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the 2026 Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award with The Cracks We Bear
