BIO
Nancy Naomi Carlson, winner of the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor, as well as a recipient of two literature translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also received grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Albertine Translation Fund (2023). In 2018, she was decorated as Chevalier of the Order of the Academic Palms by the French government. Author of four non-translated titles and eight books of translations, her most recent full-length collection of poems, An Infusion of Violets (Seagull Books), was published in 2019 and was featured in The New York Times Book Review ("New & Noteworthy"), as well as reviewed by Elizabeth Lund in The Washington Post. Her third full-length poetry collection, Piano in the Dark, is forthcoming from Seagull Books in May, 2023.
Carlson has authored eight translations, including Khal Torabully's Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull Books, 2021), which was the winner of the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and a finalist for the Sarah Maguire Poetry Prize awarded by the Poetry Translation Centre in London. Hammer with No Master, translations of René Char (Tupelo Press), was a 2017 finalist for the Firecracker Award for Poetry by the Community of Literary Magazines and presses (CLMP). The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper (Seagull Books, 2015), translations of Abdourahman Waberi, from Djibouti, was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. A co-translation (with Esperanza Hope Snyder) of Cuban Wendy Guerra's Delicates is forthcoming from Seagull Books in April, 2023, and her translation of Algerian Samira Negrouche will be published by Seagull Books in 2024.
Carlson’s translations and non-translated poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as The Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, The New England Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. She was a Visiting Poet for the Poetry Society of America. A past senior translation editor for Tupelo Quarterly and guest poetry editor for Another Chicago Magazine, she is the Translations Editor for On the Seawall (www.ronslate.com). She has served on NEA Literature Translation panels, currently serves on the Board of Directors for the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and was a member of the poetry jury for the Best Translated Book Award. For the past two years she has co-organized and co-moderated a virtual bilingual reading series to celebrate "Women in Translation" month, sponsored by PEN America and the PEN America Translation Committee, featuring live readings from authors and translators from all over the world. In addition, she is a professor of graduate counseling at Walden University, and has earned two doctoral degrees--one in foreign language methodology and one in counselor education and supervision.
