We’re pleased to welcome Eric M. B. Becker as the new editor of Words without Borders. He joined us last week and has jumped right in with preparations for our April issue on Tamil literature and May issue on writing from Palestine.

Eric comes to us with experience as a literary translator, editor, journalist, and manager of digital projects. He most recently worked as assistant managing editor at world literature journal Asymptote and as senior Web site manager at the Metropolitan Opera. In 2014, he earned a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of a collection of short stories from the Portuguese by Neustadt Prize for International Literature winner Mia Couto. He has also published translations of work by Brazilian writers Edival Lourenço, Paulo Scott, Eric Nepomuceno, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. He was resident writer at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in 2014.

Eric began his career as a journalist in Saint Louis, Missouri, where he garnered a SNA award for his reporting on the undocumented immigrant community and received an Association of Health Care Journalists Fellowship for a digital project investigating safety violations at nursing home facilities. He teaches creative writing and literature at Queens College-CUNY. In addition to Portuguese, he speaks Spanish and French. Eric will also complete his MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College-CUNY in May of this year.

Welcome, Eric!