Seth Michelson

His most recent book of original poetry in Spanish is Rengo (2022).

His most recent book of poetry in translation is The Sun of Always (2022), and it is trilingual, featuring the poetry in Mapudungun, Spanish, and English.

He also earned a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate poetry by the Mapuche poet Liliana Ancalao. That fellowship resulted in Women of the Big Sky (2020), the first-ever, single-author book of poetry by a female Mapuche writer from Argentina to appear in English-language translation. The book is in fact trilingual, featuring the poetry in Mapuzugun, Spanish, and English.

His most recent book of original poetry in English is Swimming Through Fire (2017), and it has been translated into Serbian as Plivanje kroz vatru (2020) by Vida Ognjenovic.

Michelson compiled, edited, and translated the poetry for the anthology Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention (2017). Those poems come from poetry workshops that he created and led across three years inside the most restrictive immigrant detention center in the US for undocumented, unaccompanied youth.

Outside of Latin America, Michelson has translated two books by the Indian poet Rati Saxena, Dreaming in Another Land (2014) and Scripted in the Streams (2017), and a book by the Israeli poet Amir Or, Wings (2018).

As a translator, Michelson focuses predominantly on poetry by women from Latin America. Thus, his books of poetry in translation include The Ghetto (2011; 2018) by the Argentine poet Tamara Kamenszain, The Red Song by the Uruguayan poet Melisa Machado, roly poly by the Uruguayan poet Victoria Estol, and Poems from the Disaster by the Argentine poet Zulema Moret.

Seth Michelson (born 1975), is an American poet, translator, and professor of poetry.