Fellowship award
Kelsi Vanada wears many hats at Saint Philip’s. She is a lector, verger, forum facilitator, a substitute formation leader for StoryMakers (4th, 5th, and 6th graders), and a co-chair of the nascent Formation Commission.
Professionally, Kelsi is a poet and translator and, in January, became a recipient of a Literature Translation Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts!
Kelsi is one of 18 translators selected to receive a Literature Translation Fellowship of $15,000. This fellowship will support the translation into English of the poetry collection Una pequeña personalidad linda [A Little Pretty Personality] by Spanish poet Berta García Faet. In total, the NEA will award $325,000.00 in grants to support the translation into English of works written in 12 different languages from 16 countries.
NEA Director of Literary Arts Amy Stolls said, “The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to continue its longstanding investment in our nation’s literary translators. It is through their creativity and dedication that our nation’s literary landscape continues to be enriched with stories, perspectives, and ideas from around the world that reflect the rich diversity of cultures and strengthens our democracy.”
About the project
The fellowship will support the translation from the Spanish of the poetry collection A Little Pretty Personality by Spanish poet Berta García Faet. A Little Pretty Personality is García Faet’s seventh poetry collection—its central motif is a reinvention of the image of the medieval trobairitz, women who composed, wrote verses, and performed for noble courts, and are the first known female composers of Western secular music. The poems feature a wandering narrator singing as she goes through the world in search of something not yet named.
About Kelsi
Kelsi Vanada is a poet and translator working from Spanish and collaboratively from Swedish. Her translations include United Left by Álvaro Lasso (Eulalia Books); The Visible Unseen by Andrea Chapela (Restless Books); Damascus, Atlantis: Selected Poems by Marie Silkeberg, which was longlisted for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (Terra Nova Press); Into Muteness by Sergio Espinosa (Veliz Books); and The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet (Song Bridge Press). She has also published a chapbook of original poems, Rare Earth (Finishing Line Press). Kelsi holds MFAs in Poetry (Iowa Writers' Workshop) and Literary Translation (University of Iowa). She works as the Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in Tucson, Arizona, and enjoys building a readership for literature in translation by writing reviews and teaching occasional classes.
Vanada said, “Winning a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts is invaluable—it gives validation to my translations and means I have the support to ensure that Berta García Faet’s work reaches a wider readership in English. I am eager to return to Spain to work closely with her on my drafts of A Little Pretty Personality, and grateful to the NEA for this gift!”