Our Jury

Chris Clarke
– Literary Translator and Visiting Assistant Professor of Translation Studies, University of Connecticut

Chris Clarke’s book-length translations include work by numerous authors, including Raymond Queneau, Patrick Modiano, Éric Chevillard, and Julio Cortázar. He holds an M.A. in Literary Translation from New York University, and a PhD in French from the Graduate Center (CUNY). He is a founding co-editor of the translation journal Hopscotch Translation, and is currently serving as editor of World Poetry Review. He is also a member of the creative translation collective Outranspo. He was co-awarded the 2019 French-American Foundation’s Translation Prize for Fiction.

Kate Deimling
– Translator and Poet

Kate Deimling is a translator based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a PhD in French from Columbia University, and her book translations include A Woman Like Her by best-selling French author Marc Levy, biographies of Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, and several art historical studies. She has given talks on translation at institutions including Duke University, the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey, and the National Center for Interpretation at the University of Arizona. She is also an associate poetry editor for Bracken magazine, and her first poetry collection is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2026.

Tess Lewis
– Essayist and Translator

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Christine Angot, Philippe Jaccottet, Peter Handke, and Walter Benjamin. Her recent awards include the 2017 PEN Translation Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was named a 2024 Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris. She serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review.

Sandra Smith
– Professor, New York University

Sandra Smith has published over forty translations, including Suite Française (Irène Némirovsky), But You Did Not Come Back (Marceline Loridan-Ivens), The Necklace and Other Stories: Maupassant for Modern Times, The Stranger (published in the UK as The Outsider by Albert Camus), Create Dangerously (Albert Camus), Inseparable (Simone de Beauvoir), The Prodigal Child (Irène Némirovsky), In the Shadow of Paris (Anne Sinclair), and Master of Souls (Irène Némirovsky), among others. She has won the French-American Translation Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Independent British Booksellers Book of the Year Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. Smith taught at Cambridge University in England for many years before returning to the US. She has been a professor and guest lecturer at NYU, Columbia, Barnard, Harvard and Sarah Lawrence.

James Swenson
– Professor, Rutgers University

James Swenson is a professor at Rutgers University, where he also served as Chair of French, Dean of Humanities, and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. He is the author of On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution, the translator of five books of contemporary French political philosophy, and the editor of a new critical edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Affaires de Corse. He is also the co-editor of the first complete transcription of the Favre Manuscripts, the earliest surviving drafts of Rousseau’s Emile.

Corine Tachtiris
– Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Program Director, University of Massachusetts

Corine Tachtiris is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in translation, and she translates primarily the work of contemporary women writers from Francophone Africa, Canada, and the Caribbean as well as from the Czech Republic. She is the author of the monograph Translation and Race (Routledge 2024) and translator of Frieda Ekotto’s Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella (Bucknell University Press 2019). She is prose translation editor at The Massachusetts Review and Vice President of the American Literary Translators Association.