Photo by Cressandra Thibodeaux
Katrina Dodson is a writer and translator from the Portuguese. She is the translator of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (New Directions, 2015), winner of the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, the American Translators Association Lewis Galantière Prize, and a Northern California Book Award. Her translation of Mário de Andrade’s 1928 Brazilian modernist classic, Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character will be published by New Directions in 2023. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, and has taught undergraduate literature and composition courses at UC Berkeley and Bard College. Since 2017, she has taught translation in MFA programs, previously at Mills College and the University of Iowa, and currently at Columbia University. Dodson is also an affiliated scholar of the Brazil LAB at Princeton University.
Dodson has been a fellow of the Fulbright Program, National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, and Banff Centre, as well as Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa. She first lived in Brazil as an English teacher in Rio de Janeiro from 2003 through late-2004, and has returned regularly ever since, including another year-and-a-half in Rio, São Paulo, and Ouro Preto as a Fulbright-Hays fellow from 2011-2012. She was born in San Francisco to a Vietnamese mother and American father and now lives in Brooklyn. (Please use the short bio below for events and publications.)
Short bio:
Katrina Dodson is the translator of The Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector (New Directions, 2015), winner of the PEN Translation Prize and other awards. Her translation of Mário de Andrade's 1928 Brazilian modernist classic, Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character was published by New Directions in 2023. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Dodson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and is an affiliated scholar of the Brazil LAB at Princeton University. Originally from San Francisco, she now lives in Brooklyn and teaches translation at Columbia University.
High-res photos here.
CONTACT: katdodson at gmail dot com
