Shelley Fairweather-Vega

Rate-Sharing Edit-a-Thon at ALTA
2025-11-07 12:00 - 2025-11-08 13:50 (America/Los_Angeles) | Tucson Marriott University Park, Tucson, AZ, United States
The Literary Translators Division of the National Writers Union needs your help! Drop in at lunchtime on Friday or Saturday to contribute your own data to our rate-sharing tool. We’re building a tool we can use to organize translators for better pay and working conditions.

Envisioning the Perfect Contract: ALTA Panel
2025-11-08 10:45 - 12:00 UTC | Tucson Marriott University Park, Tucson, AZ, United States
I’m joining Larissa Kyzer and Allana Lieberman to discuss translation contracts at ALTA!
Literary translation is an artistic endeavor, but publishing a translation is a business transaction, ideally governed by a fair and mutually beneficial contract. Knowing basic contractual terms governing payment, rights, and deadlines empowers you as a translator. This panel will share reference materials for drafting and reviewing contracts and will feature the panelists’ real-life experiences negotiating
recent translation agreements.
We will address contracts between publisher and translator, between author and translator, and between agent and translator, with the goal of arming literary translators with the knowledge they need to ensure fair agreements. This panel is organized by members of the Translators Organizing
Committee (now the Literary Translators Division!) of the National Writers Union.

Eurasia in Translation: Shifting Canons, Shaping Contexts
2025-11-08 15:45 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Tucson Marriott University Park, Tucson, AZ, United States
I will speak with Naomi Caffee, Sabrina Jaszi, and Tatiana Filimonova on this first-ever ALTA panel dedicated to translating the literature of Eurasia.
This panel brings together translators working across multiple languages and contexts of Central Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Siberia, and the Russian Far North, who will share their experiences creating anthologies and working with translations as educators and scholars. They will discuss the challenges of translating, contextualizing, analyzing, and canonizing literary texts from a part of the world that is often ignored in literary markets and university curricula. Speakers include contributors and editors of Tulips in Bloom: An Anthology of Central Asian Literature (Palgrave, 2024), Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, 2022), Reindeer Caravan: An Anthology of Indigenous Literature from Siberia (forthcoming, Amherst College Press) and the journal Turkoslavia.

Celebrating Central Asian and Southeast European Literature in Translation with Turkoslavia
2025-11-20 19:30 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Washington Hilton, Washington, D.C.
I’ll be reading with author Hamid Ismailov and other notable translators and writers at this ASEEES convention ancillary event.
