Olivia Lott

Website: https://oliviamlott.com

Olivia Lott is a scholar of modern and contemporary Latin American, Latinx, and hemispheric poetry and poetics, avant-gardes, and translation, with particular emphasis on the 1960s and 1970s. Her book manuscript—Radical Re/Turns: Poetics of Translation in the Latin American Long Sixties—chronicles the revitalization of avant-garde activity across the Latin American continent and within the inter-American Cold War. Her scholarly writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from PMLA, Comparative Literature, Revista Hispánica Moderna, MLN, Translation Studies, and Chasqui.

Lott is also an award-winning translator of Latin American poetry. Her translations have received recognitions from PEN America, Academy of American Poets, Words Without Borders, and University of Wisconsin Press. She currently serves as an advisory editor for Spoon River Poetry Review.

Prior to joining Yale, Lott was Marilyn Yarbrough Fellow at Kenyon College (2021-22), Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Washington and Lee University (2022-23), and Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University (2023-24).  

Selected Publications:

“In/Subordination: Pseudo/Translation and the Cultural Cold War in Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West.” PMLA, vol. 138, no. 3, 2023.

“In (Dis)Use of Reason: Abjection Poetics and Macrocephalic Modernity in El Techo de la Ballena.” Revista Hispánica Moderna, vol. 75, no. 1, 2022.

“The Battle of Legibility (special forum essay on the 2023 PEN Manifesto on Literary Translation).” MLN, vol. 138, no. 5, 2023.

“New Visibilities in Latin American Translation Studies (review essay).” Chasqui, vol. 52, no. 2, 2023.

Book-Length Literary Translations:

The Roof of the Whale Poems, by Juan Calzadilla, co-translated with Katherine M. Hedeen. University of Wisconsin Press, 2023.

Almost Obscene, by Raúl Gómez Jattin, co-translated with Katherine M. Hedeen. Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2022.

Katabasis, by Lucía Estrada. Eulalia Books, 2020.

The Dirty Text, by