Lost City Books 2026 Translation Salon

Centering the fascinating work done by professional translators. Come pepper them with questions, drink some wine, chat, & meet new people!
About this Event

Chloe Garcia Roberts, Nancy Naomi Carlson, and Alex Brostoff, are all accomplished writers who work as professional literary translators. We'll get to hear them talk about their experiences in the field and delve into the challenges and nuances of translating fiction and poetry, as well as the specificities of the source languages they translate from (including Spanish, Mandarin, French, and Portuguese). We'll have some wine, snacks, mingling and book signing at the end.

This event will take place at The Line Hotel in their Carina Room.

Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from the Spanish and Chinese. She is the author of The Reveal, which was published as part of Noemi Press’s Akrilika Series for innovative Latino writing and Fire Eater: A Translator's Theology which was a finalist for CLMP's Firecracker Award in creative nonfiction and the New Mexico Book Awards in poetry and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in such publications as the Yale Review, BOMB, Conjunctions, and the Kenyon Review. She lives outside Boston and works as deputy editor of Harvard Review and as a lecturer of poetry at MIT.

Nancy Naomi Carlson is a recipient of two translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and decorated by the French government with the Academic Palms. She is the translations editor for On The Seawall, the co-translations editor for Pleiades, and is co-chair of PEN America’s Translation Committee. Nancy Naomi Carlson was awarded the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Author of seventeen titles (including twelve translations), her poetry and translations were noted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, and elsewhere

Alex Brostoff is a scholar, writer, and translator. They are co-editor of the collection (The MIT Press, 2025) and have guest edited special journal issues on autotheory (2021) and trans literatures (2025). They’ve translated a range of literary nonfiction and critical theory from Spanish and Portuguese, including Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak's (Polity, 2024) and Brazilian activist Nêgo Bispo's (Polity, 2026). Brostoff's first book, a critical reframing of autotheory, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press. They are Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University.

The conversation will be moderated by Yvette Neisser.

Yvette Neisser is an award-winning poet, Spanish translator, and founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT). Her co-translation of Venezuelan poet Maria Teresa Ogliastri’s From the Diary of Madame Mao won the 2025 Carnegie Mellon University Press Translation Prize and will be published in Fall 2026. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus, Tikkun, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Split This Rock’s The Quarry. She lives in Silver Spring, MD.

Note: The Line has an accessible entrance at 2468 Champlain St NW. Please email [email protected] with questions.