Kelsi Vanada is a poet and literary translator. She is the author of the collection Optional Saint (Bench Editions, 2025) and the poetry chapbook Rare Earth, and the translator from Spanish and Swedish of seven books of poetry and creative nonfiction, most recently Day’s Fortune by Carlo Acevedo, Basket of Braids by Natalia Litvinova, and United Left by Álvaro Lasso. Kelsi was a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and holds MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Translation Workshop. She is the Senior Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, AZ. Find her online at kelsi-vanada.com.