Who We Are: Advisory Board and Executive Committee

Advisory Board:

Paul Anderer is Professor of Asian Humanities at Columbia University's department of East Asian languages and cultures. Professor Anderer's writings include Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction (Columbia , 1984); Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo-Literary Criticism, 1924-1939 (Stanford, 1995; paperback edition, 1999). He has been the recipient of awards from the NEH, the SSRC, the Japan Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission. He served as department chair (1989-1997), as acting dean of the Graduate School (1990-91), and as director of the Keene Center for Japanese Culture (1991-93).

Linda Asher, a former fiction editor for The New Yorker, has translated into English many French-language writers, including Restif de la Bretonne, Victor Hugo, George Simenon, and Milan Kundera.

Giovannna Calvino has taught French, Italian and American literature at New York University, Harvard and Baruch as an adjunct professor. She also worked as a producer and host of show set in New York that aired in Italy. Giovanna has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She received a Derek Bok award for excellence in Teaching from Harvard University.

Ram Devenini s the publisher of Cypher Books and Rattapallax and a film-maker who has had films shown at the Cairo International Film Festival, San Jose Film Festival, Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, etc. He was an Eagleton Associate at the Eagleton Institute for Politics at Rutgers University where he studied political theory and campaign management. He has organized several state and federal elections. He also integrates new technologies (e.g networks, SANs,...) for Citigroup.

Barbara Epler is Editor-in-Chief of New Directions. She is co-editor, with Daniel Javitch, of The Way It Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin (New Directions, 2007).

Jonathan Galassi is Publisher and Editor in Chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Carcanet has published his translations of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale which won the Weidenfeld Prize in 1999. He is chairman of the Academy of American Poets and lives in Brooklyn, New York. His first collection of poems, Morning Run, appeared in 1988.

Nathalie Handal is the author of two poetry CDs, Traveling Rooms (music by Russian musicians, Vladimir Miller and Alexandr Alexandrov), and Spell (tabla by Egyptian musician Will Soliman); two poetry books, The NeverField and The Lives of Rain (Shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize/The Pitt Poetry Series); and the editor of The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (an Academy of American Poets Bestseller and Winner of the Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles Award), Arab American and Arab Anglophone Literature (forthcoming 2007), and co-editor of Contemporary Poetry of the Eastern World: An Anthology of Poems (Norton, 2007). She has also been involved either as a writer, director or producer in over twenty theatrical and/or film productions worldwide. She is a member of Nibras Theatre Collective, co-founder of Palestinian Theatre in Motion, and Associate Artist and Development Executive for the production company The Kazbah Project (currently working on the feature film, Gibran). She teaches at Columbia University.

Richard Howard has published over 200 translations, including volumes by De Gaulle, Cioran, Stendhal, Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Gracq, Gide, Robbe-Grillet, Butor, and Claude Simon; in 1983 he received the American Book Award for his translation of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. In 1970 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his third book of poems, Untitled
Subjects, and has since published ten more volumes of verse. For 11 years he served as the poetry editor of The Paris Review and is currently poetry editor of the Western Humanities Review and Professor of Practice in the School of the Arts (Writing Division) at Columbia University.

Heidi Julavits is the author of three novels, most recently The Uses of Enchantment. She's a founding co-editor of The Believer.

Kati Marton was born in Hungary. She has combined a career as a reporter and writer with human rights advocacy. She is the author of four works of non-fiction - Hidden Power, Wallenberg, A Death in Jerusalem, and The Polk Conspiracy - and a novel, An American Woman. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, and The New Republic. A former correspondent for National Public Radio and ABC News, Marton received a George Foster Peabody Award for broadcast journalism. She lives in New York City with her husband and her son and daughter.

Antonio Muñoz Molina's thirteen books include Sepharad and Winter in Lisbon. He has won two Premio Nacional de Literatura prizes and is widely considered one of Spain's most important living writers. He was director of the Instituto Cervantes in New York City from 2004 to 2006.

Gregory Mosher presently serves as Director of the Columbia University Arts Initiative. He is a Tony Award-winning director and producer of nearly two hundred stage productions - at the Lincoln Center and Goodman Theatres, on and off-Broadway, at the Royal National Theatre, and in the West End. He is also a film and television director, producer, and writer.

Fabrice Rozie is the Cultural Attaché for the Book and Intellectual Exchange at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York. His play about the love affair between Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir, Translatlantic Liaisons, was staged at the Harold Clurman Theatre in New York to great acclaim in the fall of 2006.

Charles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1953 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. They lived in and around Chicago until 1958. Simic has also published many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry, and several books of essays, including Orphan Factory. He has also edited numerous anthologies, including an edition of The Best American Poetry in 1992. Since 1973 he has lived in New Hampshire, where he is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, teaches English and the Politics of Culture. She was educated at the University of Calcutta, and came to Cornell University in 1961 to finish doctoral work. Her books are Myself Must I Remake (1974), In Other Worlds (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic (1988), Outside in theTeaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), and Death of a Discipline (2003). An Aesthetic Education: or, Globalizing the Curriculum? is in press. She has translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) and Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps (1994), Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999), and Chotti Munda and His Arrow (2002). She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto and the University of London, as well as many other honors.

Karen Rhoads Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukasa Professor of Hellenic Studies in the Department of Classics at Columbia University. Her books include Kassandra and the Censors: Greek Poetry Since 1967. She is co-editor of A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900-2000, A Bilingual Edition.

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist whose work has appeared in more than 30 languages. In 1992, he was the first recipient of the PEN/Kolovakos Award for his promotion of Hispanic literature in the US; in 2000, he became the only American literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico. He is a curator of the Berlin International Literature Festival and is prominently featured in the Visitor's Key to Iceland. His translations include works by Octavio Paz, whom he began translating when he was 19, Jorge Luis Borges and Wang Wei, and many other writers.

Executive Committee:

Esther Allen, the CLT's Executive Director, is the author of an International PEN report on translation and globalization. She has translated a number of books from French and Spanish and is an Assistant Professor at Baruch College, CUNY.

David Damrosch is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003) and, most recently, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007). He is the general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004).

Dedi Felman is in charge of acquiring social science and current affairs titles at Oxford University Press. She reads several languages and helped found The Front Table, a book review web publication.

Stefania Heim is the co-editor of CIRCUMFERENCE: Poetry in Translation. She received her MFA from Columbia Unversity and her poems have recently appeared in various journals including Crowd, The Paris Review, and The Literary Review.

Jennifer Kronovet is the Co-Founder and Co-Editor of CIRCUMFERENCE: Poetry in Translation. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Columbia University Teachers College. Her poetry and her translations from the Yiddish have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, CROWD, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and other journals. She recently returned to her native New York City after teaching at a University in Beijing, China and works at the Academy of American Poets.

Alane Salierno Mason is senior editor at W. W. Norton & Company and president and founder of Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature. She has written for Vanity Fair, The Boston Review, The Baltimore Sun, and other publications, and is the translator of the New Directions Classic edition of Elio Vittorini's Conversations in Sicily.

Michael F. Moore, Chair of the PEN Translation Committee, is a New York-based writer, translator, and interpreter. His previous translations, from the Italian, include God's Mountain by Erri De Luca, The Silence of the Body, by Guido Ceronetti, and the poetry of Alfredo Giuliani, in I Novissimi: Poetry for the Sixties. He is currently working on a new translation of the classic Italian novel The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.

Idra Novey´s chapbook The Next Country was a winner of the 2005 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Contest. Her translations of Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto received a PEN Translation Fund Award and the book is forthcoming in 2007 in the Lannan Translation Series from BOA Editions. She is a graduate of Columbia University´s Graduate School of the Arts and has taught at Columbia and the Catholic University of Chile in Valparaiso where she lived for several years while working as a translator.

Sheldon Pollock is The William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and South Asian Studies, formerly George V. Bobrinskoy Distinguished Service Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at the University of Chicago. He was educated at Harvard University (AB m.c.l. Classics 1971; AM Sanskrit and Indian Studies 1973; PhD Sanskrit and Indian Studies 1975). His areas of specialization are Sanskrit philology and Indian intellectual and literary history, and, increasingly, comparative intellectual history. He is the translator of Ramayana Book Two: Ayodhya by Valkimi.

Michael Scammell, the CLT's Academic Director, is a professor in the Writing Division of Columbia University's School of the Arts. His authorized biography of Arthur Koestler: Cosmic Reporter, the Life and Times of Arthur Koestler, will be published by Random House in 2008. He is the author of Solzhenitsyn, A Biography and editor of The Solzhenitsyn Files, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union, and Russia's Other Writers. He has translated numerous books from Russian and other languages, including Nabokov's The Defense and The Gift, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood and Youth. The founder and first editor of the London-based human rights journal, Index on Censorship, he is currently a Vice-President of International PEN and is a past president of PEN American Center.

Samantha Schnee is the former senior editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, a literary journal founded by Francis Ford Coppola that won the 2001 National Magazine Award for fiction. She has been the U.S. recipient of the Frankfurt Book Fair Fellowship and completed her graduate studies at the New School. She translates from the Spanish.

Lytton Smith was born in Galleywood, England and lives in New York City. A poet and medievalist, he translates from Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Icelandic. The manuscript of his first collection of poems, The Lost Tin Myth, has recently been a finalist for the Dorset Prize and the Sawtooth Prize. He currently teaches University Writing at Columbia University, and is the Managing Editor and Publicist for Persea Books.