Samantha Schnee

Samantha Schnee is the founding editor and board chair of Words Without Borders, a non-profit website that expands cultural understanding through the translation, publication, and promotion of the finest contemporary international literature. WWB’s publications and programs open doors for readers of English around the world to the multiplicity of viewpoints, richness of experience, and literary perspective on world events offered by writers in other languages. WWB seeks to connect international writers to the general public, to students and educators, and to the media and to serve as a primary online location for a global literary conversation. Since 2003, WWB has published thousands of pieces of fiction and poetry from over 150 countries.

Samantha also works directly with select authors, translating their work from Spanish into English. Her translation of The Goddesses of Water, a collection by Mexican poet Jeannette Clariond, is forthcoming from Shearsman Books in the UK and World Poetry Books in the US. Her translation of Carmen Boullosa’s penultimate novel, The Book of Anna, which was nominated for the Jan Michalski Prize, was published by Coffee House Press last year; and her translation of Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft, which was published by Dallas press Deep Vellum in 2014, was shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize. She is currently at work on a translation of Boullosa’s latest novel, The Book of Eve, which has been shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prize.

Since 2014 she has been a trustee of English PEN, one of the world’s first non-governmental organizations and among the first international bodies advocating for human rights, specifically those of persecuted writers; she chaired their Writers in Translation committee from 2014-17. Separately, she has served as secretary of the American Literary Translators Association since 2017. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, she lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and three sons, all of whom participated in AMIGOS programs.