Keynote Speakers

The 2011 ALTA Annual Conference keynote speakers are:

Douglas Hofstadter: “Let 100 Neutrinos Bloom”

Paul Vangelisti: “Assassins in Love: Poets as Translators”

Douglas Hofstadter is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Though best known for Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Pulitzer Prize, 1980), he has also translated (most notably, Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin) and written on translation (Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, in 1997, and in 2009, Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation).

Paul Vangelisti is the author of some twenty books of poetry, as well as being a noted translator from Italian. His most recent book of poems, Two, appeared from Talisman House in 2010. Lucia Re’s and his translation of Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations (Green Integer, 2005) won the 2006 Premio Flaiano in Italy and the 2006 PEN-USA Award for Translation. In 2010, his translation of Adriano Spatola’s The Position of Things: Collected Poems, 1961-1992, won the Academy of American Poets Raizzis/de Palchi Book Prize for Translation. From 1971-1982 he was co-editor, with John McBride, of the literary magazine Invisible City and, from 1993-2002, edited Ribot, the annual report of the College of Neglected Science. He worked as a journalist at the Hollywood Reporter (1972-1974), and as Cultural Affairs Director at KPFK Radio (1974-1982). Currently, with Luigi Ballerini, he is editing a five-volume anthology of U.S. poetry from 1960 to the present, Nuova poesia americana, for Mondadori in Milan. Vangelisti is Founding Chair of the Graduate Writing program at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles.

Find out more about the 2011 Conference, and come join us in Kansas City for all the excitement!

Interested in who the Keynote Speakers and what their topics were for past conferences? Click on a link below to find out more information.

Keynote Speakers 2010 |Keynote Speakers 2009 | Keynote Speakers 2008