Olivia Lott is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. She is a scholar of comparative Latin American and hemispheric poetry and poetics, avant-garde networks, 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 and the parallel generation of revolutionary translation itineraries 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.
Olivia 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. Her most recent co-translation (with Katherine M. Hedeen), The Roof of the Whale Poems by Juan Calzadilla, was recently longlisted for the 2024 National Translation Award in Poetry. Her public-facing writing on poetry and translation has appeared in venues such as Action Books Blog, The Kenyon Review, Reading in Translation, Words Without Borders, and Vallejo & Co. (Peru). She currently serves as an advisory translation editor for SRPR.
Before joining Yale, Olivia 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). At Yale, she teaches courses on 20th and 21st century Latin American and Latinx literatures and cultures, poetry and poetics, and translation.