Translators Will Morningstar and Michelle Mirabella in conversation

PLEASE NOTE THAT AN RSVP DOES NOT GUARANTEE YOU A SEAT. We can accommodate approximately 50 seated and 80 standing. If you require a seat, please plan to arrive early.

Translators Will Morningstar (All That Dies in April by Mariana Travacio) and Michelle Mirabella (The Cracks We Bear by Catalina Infante) will join us for a conversation about their work.

About the books:

All That Dies in April:

Lina has dreamt for years of leaving her tiny village in the drought-stricken region. Her son left long ago to find work and a better fortune. Relicario, her husband, is content to stay put in the land of his ancestors, tending to their graves. Ignoring Relicario’s pleas, a desperate Lina decides to abandon their home in search of her son, work, and water. She starts her journey on foot, and Relicario eventually follows behind, bringing a donkey and a sack with his ancestors’ bones. Both witness unspeakable violence, cruelty, and folly, but the hope of reuniting their family keeps them alive. Poetically charged, restrained, and delicately condensed, this is a suspenseful ancestral tale rooted in a long Latin American history of rural displacement and perpetual inequality.

The Cracks We Bear:

Motherhood is terrifying, thinks Laura, feeling small and helpless as she holds her newborn daughter. Instead of joy, she feels fear, and then anger at her own late mother for her absence. The Cracks We Bear opens as a story about new motherhood. Soon, however, it reveals itself to be an exploration of memory and trauma as Laura starts to recall her childhood in Chile. Born in exile to staunchly communist parents, she returns to Chile with her mother after the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In the fledgling democracy she grows up in, topics of capitalism and communism are ever present. Laura’s reflections, born from personal experience, are interwoven with raw and honest memories of her family life. Borrowing elements from the Bildungsroman, and pulling from the Latin American short story tradition, Catalina Infante recounts Laura’s past in vignettes. Piece by piece, the short chapters come together like a reconstructed vase, bearing its cracks.

About the translators:

Will Morningstar is a book editor and translator whose work is featured in Deep Vellum's Best Literary Translations 2025 anthology and has appeared in journals such as the New England Review, ANMLY, Two Lines, Latin American Literature Today, Strange Horizons, and the Massachusetts Review, as well as in museums and cultural institutions throughout Spain. He is the publisher of Boston-based Diptych Press, a new initiative to foster dialogue about literature from around the world.

Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish-to-English literary translator. In addition to her translation of Catalina Infante's debut novel, The Cracks We Bear, her work appears in the anthologies Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024) and Daughters of Latin America (HarperCollins, 2023), as well as in venues such as World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, and Southwest Review. A former ALTA Travel Fellow, Michelle holds an M.A. in Translation and Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute and is an alumna of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. Find more of her work at www.michellemirabella.com.

Sign up for our newsletter to hear about more upcoming events!