Johanna Bishop will be translating the short stories in Issue One of TheFLR. The Florentine Literary Review.
Johanna grew up in Pennsylvania, was pigeonholed as a future translator by a standardized test in middle school, and has embraced that fate full-time since 2004. She is primarily active in the field of contemporary art, where she has dozens of titles to her name and works with many of Italy’s leading critics, curators, and institutions. She has co-translated poetry from both English into Italian (Karen Alkalay-Gut’s Danza del ventre a Tel Aviv, with Andrea Sirotti, 2010) and Italian into English (Mia Lecomte’s For the Maintenance of Landscape, with Brenda Porster, 2012).
Her translations of other contemporary poets such as Franco Buffoni, Maria Grazia Calandrone, Alessandro Canzian, Patrizia Cavalli, Andrea Inglese, Marina Massenz, Patrizia Valduga and Carlo Viviani, have appeared in various reviews and anthologies over the years, and she has increasingly dabbled in fiction, publishing short stories and experimental prose by Gherardo Bortolotti, Alex Cecchetti, Marco Giovenale and Alessandro Raveggi.
She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she ignored all of her Italian professor’s sage advice about not moving to Tuscany after graduation. That was almost two decades ago, which means she’s had plenty of occasion to regret it, but also means it’s home.
