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Photo: Annette Hornischer

Translator; and Founding Editor, Words Without Borders

Dirk Ippen Fellow - Class of Spring 2024


Samantha Schnee is a translator and the founding editor of Words Without Borders, established in 2003. The mission of Words Without Borders is twofold: first, to cultivate global awareness by expanding access to international writing and create a bridge between readers, writers, and translators; second, to highlight writers in indigenous, endangered, and other world languages that are too often marginalized. Schnee received her BA from Dartmouth College and MFA from The New School Graduate Writing Program. Her translations include Carmen Boullosa’s The Book of Eve (Deep Vellum, 2023); The Goddesses of Water (World Poetry Editions, 2022), a collection by Mexican poet Jeannette Clariond, which was selected for the Academy of American Poets 2022 Featured Fall Books list; Boullosa’s penultimate novel, The Book of Anna (Coffee House, 2020), and Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014), which was shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize. In 2015, Schnee won the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation for an excerpt from Boullosa’s Complot de los Románticos (Gulf Coast, 2016); she will complete the translation of the novel this year thanks to a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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