Events

Ed Bok Lee is the author of three books of poetry and prose, Real Karaoke People, Whorled, and Mitochondrial Night, as well as numerous short stories, plays, and essays. Honors include an American Book Award, an Asian American Literary Award (Members’ Choice Award), a Minnesota Book Award, and a PEN/Open Book Award, and numerous grants and fellowships. As a literary translator and recipient of the 49th Modern Korean Literature Translation Grand Prize in Poetry, Lee's contributions have ranged from the prose of science fiction writer, Anatoli Kim (Kazakhstan) to Smiling in an Old Photograph: Poems by Kim Ki-taek (OHM Editions) and Hail, Che Guevara! by Park Jeong Dae (Black Ocean, forthcoming). Lee attended kindergarten in Seoul, South Korea, studied Slavic (and Central Asian) Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, and holds an MFA from Brown University. An Associate Professor in Fine Arts, he teaches at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis/St. Paul. www.edboklee.com

Sandy Fontana teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Shawnee Community College. She established and maintains Krēātiv´ətē, an online creative journal for students, and sponsors the annual Poetry Slam! at SCC. She received her MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale where she won the 2002, 2003, 2004 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poetry has been published in such literary magazines as Atlanta Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Little Patuxent Review, and Tin House Online—and fiction in Raleigh Review. Sandy is a racquetball enthusiast and hopes for an imminent worldwide racquetball renaissance.

Kevin Phan lives in Rocky Mountains. He attended the University of Iowa (B.A.) and the University of Michigan (M.F.A.). His poetry has previously appeared in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Fence, the Cincinnati Review, the Georgia Review, and many other fine journals. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. His first collection of poetry is titled, "Dears, Beloveds." For a living, he works with the earth.  

Eric Schlich is the author of Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife, a novel forthcoming from Overlook Press (January 2024) and the story collection Quantum Convention, winner of the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Prize. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, and Electric Literature, among other journals. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee, where he is an assistant professor at the University of Memphis.

Asri Nurul Qodri is from Indonesia and has been teaching English since 2004. She worked in Kyiv, Ukraine until 2015 and went to Ohio University to attain a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics, where she taught at the Ohio Program of Intensive English (OPIE). Asri has also worked in English-Indonesian translations and vice versa. A few major projects are an English play written by Ray Harding (Charles Sturt University), a series of Indonesian comic books called Baratayuda, and a novel entitled Siri by Asmayani Kusrini. In May 2023, she graduated from Arizona State University with a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. Her dissertation focused on the interplay between multilingualism, Autism Spectrum Disorders, and mobile technology. 

Born and raised in Phoenix and a third generation Sun Devil, Acacia Wastchak is a senior undergraduate student in Barrett, the Honors College at ASU studying International Trade with a minor in French. Travel and foreign languages are two of her biggest passions and what has led her to study abroad in Ecuador, Italy, and France. Both her mother and grandmother are writers, so literature - and especially poetry - have always been a big part of Acacia's life and inspired her own love of writing and language. Acacia is a polyglot and speaks Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese in addition to English and is currently learning German. As an intern for TLP last semester, she both translated poetry from HFR into Spanish, Italian, and French as well as coordinated and oversaw the Earth Day Translation Challenge in Aix-en-Provence, France at the local universities.

JP Hanson (they/them/theirs/elle) is an Arizona State alum, who studied English Rhetoric, Spanish, and Media Analysis. Spanish is their second language, but are continuing to learn through communication and translation. Their midwestern roots took them back to Chicago, IL where they are earning an M.A. in Women & Gender Studies, emphasizing abolitionism and the black diaspora with hopes to become a professor. They think you can do absolutely anything. (updated 2023). 

Boi Ngoc Thai is an undergraduate student at Arizona State University. She is pursuing a bachelor degree in journalism and mass communication at the Walter Cronkite School with concentration in PR, and a minor in Business at the W.P Carey School. Born and raised in Vietnam, she is fluent in Vietnamese, English, Mandarin and Cantonese. After graduation, she aspires to work in the international public relations field. (updated 2023)

Chris Hoshnic is an Arizona State University English student and Special Projects Intern for the Thousand Languages Project. Chris has written, directed and produced three short films and one feature film. His short film OZZY, was accepted into the Jerome International Film Festival where it had its world premiere. He has also written several screenplays, two of which placed in the finals of numerous screenplay competitions.

Asna Nusrat (she/her) is a fiction writer in ASU's MFA program, translator, and non-fiction associate editor at Hayden's Ferry Review. Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, she is a bilingual writer who often dabbles in translating to or from Urdu--her Word of Home. Beyond writing and other life things, classical South Asian music, poetry and the dance form of Kathak are her major indulgences that often offer portals for alternate storytelling, in mind and Word.

Belén Agustina Sánchez comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina where she was a translator and children's and YA's literature editor. Since 2019, she has been PhD student in the Spanish Program at the School of International Letters and Cultures. She researches the connections between literature and science through the analysis of Science Fiction and Environmental Humanities. She is also finishing her certificate in Translation Studies. The most important work she’s translated to Spanish is Eduardo Kohn's book How Forest Think.

Zhongxing Zeng is a Ph.D. (Literature) student in the English Department at Arizona State University. His research interests include William Blake, English Romanticism, and English-Chinese Literary Translation. He is also a singer-songwriter with publications of original music on NetEase Music, Apple Music, and Spotify under the artist name 曾寅.

Rachel Galvin's most recent poetry collection is Uterotopia, published by Persea Books in January 2023. She is also the author of Elevated Threat Level, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Pulleys & Locomotion. Her translations include Raymond Queneau's Hitting the Streets, winner of the 2014 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and Oliverio Girondo's Decals: Complete Early Poetry (with Harris Feinsod), a finalist for the 2018 National Translation Award. Her current project translating the poetry of Alejandro Albarrán Polanco is supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arrts. Her work appears in journals and anthologies including Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best American Poetry 2020, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She is a co-founder of Outranspo, an international creative translation collective (outranspo.com). Galvin is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program and is the faculty lead for Translation Studies.

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator in Chicago. His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022) . His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Sarah Viren is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and author of the essay collection Mine, which was longlisted for The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. She translated the novella Córdoba Skies by Federico Falco, along with a number of the Argentine author's short stories, and is currently co-editing an anthology of the essay in the Americas, "The Great American Essay," which is forthcoming from Mad Creek Books. Viren's work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Kerouac House Residency, and a Fulbright student grant to Colombia. She's an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Arizona State University.

Jenny Yang Cropp an associate professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University and the author of the poetry collection String Theory, a 2016 Oklahoma Book Award finalist, as well as two chapbooks, Hanging the Moon and Not a Bird or a Flower. She serves as the poetry editor for the literary journal Big Muddy and as the Southwest Council Chair for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She holds an MFA from Minnesota State University-Mankato and a PhD from the University of South Dakota.

Erika Eckart is the author of the tyranny of heirlooms, a chapbook of interconnected prose poems (Sundress Publications, 2018). Her writing has appeared in Double Room, Agni, Quarter After Eight, Quick Fiction, Nano Fiction and Quiddity, and elsewhere. She is a High School English Teacher in Oak Park, IL where she lives with her husband and two children.

Belén Agustina Sánchez comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina where she was a translator and children's and YA's literature editor. Since 2019, she is a PhD student in the Spanish Program at the School of International Letters and Cultures. She researches the connections between literature and science through the analysis of Science Fiction and Environmental Humanities. She is also finishing her certificate in Translation Studies. The most important work she translated to Spanish is Eduardo Kohn's book How Forest Think.

Shahzadi Laibah  Burq is a multilingual speaker of Urdu, English, Persian/Dari, Pashto, and Punjabi. She is currently doing her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics at Arizona State University. Her research interests include L2 pedagogy, language planning and policy in higher education, and cognitive linguistics. Burq did her Bachelors in English Language and Literature from a University in Pakistan. She taught ESL for four years and became an enthusiastic advocate for linguistic diversity in academia. As an instructor, She takes a translanguaging stance and encourages the use of students' full multilinguistic, multimodal and semiotic repertoire to create inclusivity and equity among students.

Laura Dicochea is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the School of Transborder studies. Her MA studies focused on Spanish for the professions and Spanish sociolinguistics: Spanish heritage language pedagogy and bilingualism. Laura’s current Ph.D. work focuses on transnationals from Mexico in secondary levels and higher education. She holds a translation certificate from the University of Arizona. She has been in the translation world for three years in the medical and legal field and, more recently, prose translation.

Asna Nusrat (she/her) is a fiction writer in ASU's MFA program, translator, and non-fiction associate editor at Hayden's Ferry Review. Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, she is a bilingual writer who often dabbles in translating to or from Urdu--her Word of Home. Beyond writing and other life things, classical South Asian music, poetry and the dance form of Kathak are her major indulgences that often offer portals for alternate storytelling, in mind and Word.

Gina Scarpete Walters is currently doing her Ph.D. in Comparative Culture and Language at Arizona State University, where she also serves as a Graduate Teaching Associate of Linguistics. Her research interests lie primarily in the area of cognitive linguistics and cultural linguistics. She holds two M.A. degrees from the University of Bucharest, one in Advanced Studies in Linguistics and another in Translation Studies. She is one of the recipients of the 2022 NFMLTA-NCOLCTL Graduate Research Support Grant. Scarpete Walters is an advocate for linguistic and cultural diversity and less commonly taught languages.