Four Columbia Writers Named National Endowment for the Arts Fellows

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced this year’s Literature Fellowships, with Columbia represented in both Creative Writing and Translation.

This year the Creative Writing Fellowships were for the discipline of poetry, with 35 Fellows selected from a pool of more than 2,000 applicants, for prizes totaling $875,000. Writing alum Madeleine Cravens ’22 was selected as one of this year’s recipients, and will receive an award of $25,000. Cravens’ work has been featured in outlets including The New Yorker, The Nation, Kenyon Review, and Best New Poets. She is author of the collection Pleasure Principal (Scribner, 2024), and winner of the 2024 Narrative Prize. 

This year’s Translation Fellowships went to 22 translators for awards totaling $325,000 and work spanning 17 languages and 21 countries. Three Columbia affiliates won the honor, including Writing alum Elina Alter ’16, Adjunct Associate Writing Professor Natasha Wimmer, and Adjunct Assistant Writing Professor Julia Sanches. Each of them will receive an award from $10,000 to $20,000.

Alter was awarded in support of her translation of the novel Steppe by Oksana Vasyakina from its original Russian. The second part of a trilogy originally published in 2022, Steppe is a work of autofiction following a lesbian poet as she tries to reconcile with her criminal father. With its depiction of queer characters and themes, Vasyakina’s work has carried additional weight in the face of growing repression in her home country. Alter’s translation of the first installment Wound (Catapult, 2023), was named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year in 2023.

Wimmer received the honor in support of her translations of late Salvadoran author Roque Dalton’s Tavern and Other Places and A Slightly Odious Book from their original Spanish. Born in El Salvador in 1935, Dalton was an activist and poet sentenced to death by José María Lemus’s regime, but escaped when the 1960 coup came to fruition a day before his scheduled execution. After years in exile, he returned to his home country and continued his work, joining the People's Revolutionary Army, before ultimately being assassinated by the same group on suspicion of spying for the CIA; all before the age of 40. Wimmer is the translator of several books, including nine from author Roberto Bolaño, and The Twilight Zone (Graywolf Press, 2021) by Nona Fernández, a Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Sanches earned support for her translation of It Is Always the Hour of Our Death Amen by Mariana Salomão Carrara from its original Brazilian Portuguese. Written in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book begins with a lost woman in her 70s wandering a roadside, unable to remember her name, and chronicles her daily life at an understaffed shelter for aging adults. Sanches is the translator of many books, including works by Munir Hachemi and Eva Baltasar, and Mariana Oliver’s Migratory Birds (Transit Books, 2021), which won her the 2022 PEN Translation Award. She also served as a judge for the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature, which went to Columbia’s own Lin King ’22.

Learn more about this year’s National Endowment for the Arts and access the full lists of recipients here.