About

Elisa Wouk Almino is a writer, editor, and literary translator from Portuguese who lives in Los Angeles. Home, belonging, language, visual art, poetry, and music are all subjects she has returned to over the years. She worked for seven years as an editor at Hyperallergic and is now the deputy editor of L.A. Times Image, the style and culture magazine at the newspaper. Back in the day, she was the book reviews editor of Words Without Borders. You can find her writing in Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Times, Paris Review Daily, Literary Hub, NYR Daily, The Nation, LA Review of Books, Guernica Magazine, and other places.

In her work as a translator, Elisa primarily focuses on Brazilian poetry. In 2017, she published her translations of the Brazilian poet Ana Martins Marques in This House (Scrambler Books), a book centered on the idea of home, which she also illustrated. In 2022, her Ana Cristina Cesar translations won the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, judged by Daniel Borzutzky. You can find Elisa's translations in Asymptote Journal, Washington Square Review, Circumference Magazine, Stonecutter Journal, Literary Hub, harlequin creature, Words Without Borders, among others.

In 2020, Rizzoli published a monograph edited by Elisa on one of the earliest, overlooked American abstract artists, Alice Trumbull Mason. Since then, Elisa has joined the board of the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation, where she serves as the Chair of the Legacy Committee, overseeing the legacies of these two phenomenal artists.

In the past, Elisa has taught an Art & Culture Writing workshop at Catapult and an Introduction to Translation class at UCLA Extension. She also serves as an advisor at Uncool Artist, where she meets with students and focuses on workshopping their artist statements and bios.

Elisa has been awarded writing residencies at Art Omi (2022, 2015), Tin House (2022) and the Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland (2019), and she was a 2021 recipient of the Mae Fellowship, a virtual program providing support for women and nonbinary writers working on their first books. She has spoken about her work at Princeton University, UC Berkeley, Barnard College, the New School, CalArts, and other places. Her essays have been highlighted as "must-reads" by the Atlantic and ARTnews, and she’s been interviewed about her work for KCET, UCLA, and Electric Literature.

Elisa has a master's degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University and a bachelor's in English with a minor in art history from Barnard College. She is an MFA candidate at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

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