Alana Marie
Levinson-LaBrosse
is a poet, translator, and Assistant Professor in the English department at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, where she founded the department in 2011. Her book-length translations from Kurdish include Kajal Ahmed’s Handful of Salt (The Word Works, 2016) and Abdulla Pashew’s Dictionary of Midnight (Phoneme Media, 2019), and her work has appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, In Other Words (British Center for Literary Translation), Sewanee Review, The Iowa Review, and World Literature Today. In 2021, Levinson-LaBrosse was named a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literary Translation, the first ever translator from the Kurdish to receive the honor.
Levinson-LaBrosse earned her PhD in Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, specializing in nineteenth century poetry, as well as her MFA in poetry writing from Warren Wilson College and MEd from the University of Virginia in English Education. She currently serves as the Founding Director of Kashkul, the center for arts and culture at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, as a board member for Zheen Archive in Sulaimani. She was the Founding Director for Slemani City of Literature, having led the city’s successful application to join the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in 2019.
