Kelsi Vanada is a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow, and she holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. She writes poems and translates from Spanish and collaboratively from Swedish. She cultivates a readership for poetry in translation by writing reviews, and teaches occasional short-term classes and workshops. Since 2018, Kelsi has worked as the Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in Tucson, Arizona. For Kelsi’s listing in Poets & Writers’ directory, click here. For Author’s Guild listing, click here.
kelsivanada [at] gmail [dot] com
Honors and Awards
Finalist for the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize, 2024
2023 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize Finalist for Optional Saint, a book of poems, judged by Shane McCrae (under the title Antiphon)
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-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)
Peter Taylor Fellow, Kenyon Review Summer 2020 Translation Workshop (workshop was deferred to 2021 due to COVID-19)
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
Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators Residency recipient, 2018: Visby, Sweden
Shortlisted, Disquiet International Literary Prize 2018
Fulbright Study/Research Awards semifinalist, January 2017 (Translation, Sweden)
ALTA Travel Fellow, 2016
Plughaupt Fellowship recipient, 2016-2017 (grant for a new Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate)
2016 Asymptote Close Approximations contest winner
Bodtker Grant recipient (The Danish American Heritage Society), 2015
Prairie Center for the Arts writing residency recipient, 2010
