Rika Lesser

[excerpted from author's website]
Educated at Yale and Columbia, Lesser has been the recipient of many grants and awards originating here or in Scandinavia—among them the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a poetry grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 1995 the Swedish Authors Foundation gave her an award in recognition of her work translating and promoting Swedish literature abroad and in 2000 a grant to go on with some of that work. In 1996 she was awarded the Poetry Translation Prize of the Swedish Academy. In 1999 she was the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship to Sweden. In 2001 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry Translation, which she received once again for Fiction in 2013. In 2001 she also was a guest at Yaddo. In 2002, for her work translating Sonnevi's Mozart's Third Brain, she received the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize for the second time.

Co-chair of its Translation Committee from 1989-1995, Rika Lesser served on the Executive Board of PEN American Center from 1991-1996. She has taught poetry writing and literary translation at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Columbia University School of the Arts, the George Washington University, the New School, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Yale University and as a guest lecturer at many other places. She was the Spring 2011 Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College in Virginia.