Michele Bantz is an American translator of Spanish and Portuguese. She attended the Middlebury Portuguese School as a Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace and earned her MA in translation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS). Her traineeships in translation were completed at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, DC and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile. Michele is certified by the American Translators Association (ATA) for both Spanish and Portuguese into English translation and has worked as a freelance translator and editor for over 20 years. Her work as a literary translator has been awarded support from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), Bread Loaf, The Granum Foundation, The New York Circle of Translators (NYCT), and The Rona Jaffe Foundation. She has been a writer-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center (VSC) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), and has also served as a juror for translation-focused writing residencies. Michele’s translations have been or are scheduled to be published by the United Nations, Transparency International, Consequence Forum, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and she is currently at work translating short stories and poetry from Latin America and her first book-length literary translation of a contemporary novel from Portugal, O Fogo Será a Tua Casa, working title in English: “Fire Shall Be Your Home,” by Nuno Camarneiro, from Portuguese into English. You can read an excerpt from the novel here and listen to an audio recording of another excerpt here.