the editors

Founding Editors

Heather Cleary’s translations and literary criticism have appeared in Two Lines, The Coffin Factory, Review, The Quarterly Conversation and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She was awarded a PEN Translation Fund grant in 2005 for her work with the poetry of Oliverio Girondo, and her translation of Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets (Open Letter 2012) was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. More recently, her translations of Chejfec’s The Dark (Open Letter 2013, nominated for ALTA’s National Translation Award) and Poems to Read on a Streetcar, a pamphlet of Girondo’s poetry (New Directions 2014) have made their way into bookstores. She holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University.

Jennifer Croft is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize, and her translations from Polish, Spanish, and Ukrainian have appeared in The New York Times, n+1, Electric Literature, BOMB, Guernica, The New Republic and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a Founding Editor of The Buenos Aires Review. Read illustrated chapters of her novel—in a wide range of languages—at homesickbook.space.

Pola Oloixarac‘s first novel, Las teorías salvajes (The Wild Theories) has been translated into French, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Portuguese, and English. In 2010, she was the recipient of a National Award for Literature from the National Arts Fund, was chosen as one of the best young Spanish-language novelists by Granta magazine, and participated in the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. She has been a Literary Fellow at Yaddo (USA), the Meet Maison des Ecrivains Etrangers et traducteurs (France), the Amsterdam Writer’s Residence (Holland), and at Dora Maar (France). She has contributed to publications including The New York Times International, São Paolo’s La Folha, The Telegraph UK, and Etiqueta Negra. Her love affair with English began with H.P. Lovecraft and E.A. Poe as a little girl, and deepened progressively with Carl Sagan, Pynchon, Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Watson, and the American novels of V. Nabokov.

Maxine Swann is the author of three novels, Serious Girls, Flower Children, and, most recently, The Foreigners, which takes place in Buenos Aires, where she has resided for the past decade. Recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, her fiction has also received a Pushcart Prize, an O’Henry Award, a Cohen Award, and been featured in Best American Short Stories. She is a contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Buenos Aires Herald, among others. Of the many South American writers she admires, Roberto Arlt, Alejandra Pizarnik and Bernardo Carvahlo are at the top of the list. She was most recently blown away by Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration).

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Associate Editors

Martín Felipe Castagnet is currently completing his PhD at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, with a dissertation on the publishing industry. His novel Los cuerpos de verano (Bodies of Summer, Dalkey Archive Press) won the Premio a la Joven Literatura Latinoamericana (Award for Young Latin American Literature) and has been published in both Spanish and French. Castagnet has held residencies in the Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs de Saint-Nazaire and in La Marelle, Villa des projets d’auteurs de Marseille. His work appears in Tónica magazine. He has studied Japanese off and on for over ten years, and his favorite book title is Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. Last year he ordered all of the books of Paul Auster, Chuck Palahniuk, and Maurice Sendark online.

Lucas Mertehikian says: I studied Literature at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and Journalism at the University of San Andrés, and am currently working on my Master’s at the Universidad de Tres de Febrero. I’m also involved in UBA’s program in Twentieth-Century Literature, under the supervision of Daniel Link. I write for magazines like Ñ and Los inrockuptibles and run Dakota Editora, which published the first Argentine editions of Tao Lin, Megan Boyle, and Ben Lerner. These days I’m reading a few other contemporary writers, like Noah Cicero and Blake Butler, and poets like Daniel Poppick and Marjorie Welsh. In 2011, I wrote a little book of poems, Las listas (published by El Fin de la Noche), which was translated into English by Jennifer Croft and will appear this year in Metamorphoses. Among my favorite North American poets: Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, William Carlos Williams, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Plath, Bishop, Pound, and others.

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Junior Editors

Melissa Kitson is an Australian writer and journalist. She has worked as a reporter in Guadalajara, Mexico, a translator for the Pan American Games and a writer for Oxford University Press. She currently lives in Buenos Aires.

Andrea Rosenberg translates from Spanish and Portuguese. Her translation of David Jiménez’s powerful collection of essays on Asia, Children of the Monsoon, will be published later this year. Among her favorite Latin American writers are Luis Sepúlveda (whose absolutely brilliant Patagonia Express was translated into English as Full Circle by Chris Andrews), Angélica Gorodischer, and Tomás González.

Belén Agustina Sánchez studies literature at the University of Buenos Aires. She is also a drummer and a rock journalist. She contributes to independent publications on youth culture with translations, reviews of concerts, books, and records, and she has interviewed, among others, her favorite German band Die Toten Hosen. She likes playing videogames. She always asks Santa for Robert Lawrence Stine and Stephen King; an enigmatic edition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own has been with her since her adolescence. She is studying German and Sanskrit.

Fernando Montes Vera is an Argentinian writer and linguist. He has taught Spanish and Academic writing in universities both in the U.S. and his home country. Currently, he teaches at a federal prison through the University of Buenos Aires, where he also works as a researcher and translator for courses on the analysis of mass media language and Sociolinguistics courses. His first novel, The Reed College Massacre (Dakota novel award, 2012), narrates a journey through U.S. academia within the theoretical and methodological framework of a mass shooting. As a reader and spectator, he feels inspired by the theatrical work of Maruja Bustamante and the poetry of Diego de Aduriz. He looks forward to translating their works in the future. (Photo: Paula Salischiker)

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Contributing Editors

Russell Scott Valentino is a scholar, translator, editor, and author based in Bloomington, Indiana. He has long been a fan of Argentine literature and was particularly inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s punctilious translator Pierre Menard, whose life-long work on the Quixote made him think, hey, I can do that! Currently professor and chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Indiana University, he dreams of completing another dozen or so translations in the Menard manner. See, for example, here and here.