AUTHOR | WRITER | POET | TEACHER | TRANSLATOR
Wendy Call
Assistant Professor, Pacific Lutheran University
Wendy Call is co-editor of the craft anthology Telling True Stories (Penguin, 2007), author of the award-winning nonfiction book No Word for Welcome (Nebraska, 2011), and translator of In the Belly of Night and Other Poems by Irma Pineda (Pluralia, 2020). She is currently a 2018 Seattle City Artist and 2018-2020 Fulbright Scholar in Colombia. Her translation projects have also been supported by Jack Straw Artist Support Program, National Endowment for the Arts, and Ragdale Foundation. She teaches creative writing, environmental studies, and Native and Indigenous studies at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. She lives, gardens, and cares for her two beloved ahijadas in Southeast Seattle.
I am forever grateful to the Events Coordinator of Elliott Bay Book Company, Karen Maeda Allman, for introducing me to Cecilia Martínez-Gil. “I just feel like you two would have a lot to talk about,” Karen wrote to me in 2010. Indeed.
Cecilia have shared our poetry translations (mine of work by Mexican-Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, and hers of her own beautiful work). We have supported each other in developing university courses on the varied topics of Latin American literatures, writing pedagogy, ecology, and place-based writing. We have co-presented our ideas about literary translation at national conferences in Portland, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis.
The many points of intersection in our interests, our commitments, and our creative work is a source of joy and amazement to me. I am grateful to Cecilia for introducing my books and essays and translations to hundreds of her students at Santa Monica College and I look forward to further collaborations in the years to come.