Russell Valentino

Translator, Essayist, Editor, Nonfiction Writer

Russell Scott Valentino’s work sits comfortably between scholarship and poetry, sometimes performing both at once through translation. He is the translator of eight books of fiction and literary nonfiction (from Croatian, Italian, and Russian), the author of two scholarly books on literary and cultural history, and the editor of multiple anthologies. He served as editor-in-chief at The Iowa Review from 2009 to 2013 and President of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) from 2013 to 2016. He is the founder of and senior editor at Autumn Hill Books. His essays, short translations, and poetry have appeared in a wide range of venues, including The New York Times, Del Sol Review, The Buenos Aires Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. He is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships, two Fulbright research awards, and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of State. A professor in Indiana University’s Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, his translation of Bosnian author Miljenko Jergović’s mammoth historical saga Kin is slated for publication by Archipelago Books in 2021.

Russell has co-led multi-genre writing workshops abroad with AAL founder Robin Hemley in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas (or rather on land that emerges from them) and is looking forward to leading AAL workshops in the future.