Whitney Celeste DeVos is a translator and scholar specializing in literatures of the hemispheric Americas. Her current work focuses on lenguas originarias, the region’s autochthonous languages.
At MacDowell, DeVos researched and wrote the introduction to her English translation of Martín Tonalmeyotl's Tlalkatsajtsilistle/Ritual de los olvidados, originally published bilingually in Atzacoaloya Náhuatl and Spanish. She also conducted an interview with the author, to appear in tripwire: a journal of poetics as part of a special issue on Indigenous poetics. To support her work on this project, DeVos was awarded a translation fellowship from the NEA and a Global South Translation Fellowship from the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University in 2022. Excerpts from the manuscript-in-progress, currently under consideration at Sterling Lord Literary, have appeared in POETRY, Michigan Quarterly Review, World Literature Today online, Latin American Literature Today, and Modern Poetry in Translation, and are forthcoming in Ecotone. While in residence, DeVos also began translating, Amapolas Sobre el Hielo (Poppes Above the Ice), an unfinished experimental novel by Judith Santopietro. Finally, she began a new collection of her own poems, tentatively titled The Leopoldina Monologues.
