Maíra Mendes Galvao

Maíra Mendes-Galvão was born in Brasília, Brasil in 1981. She holds a BA in Graphic Design from the University of Brasília (UnB), but changed paths and began circa 2004 a career as a professional translator and copyeditor. After a later stint back in academia, when she studied Philosophy of Language and Logic, with a special interest in theories of meaning, logic, and metaphor, she decided to forge ahead in the editorial industry instead. In addition to commercial translation, she took on literary projects and translated authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Boris Fishman, Monique Wittig and Mina Loy into Brazilian Portuguese. Now back to academia, she got an MA by the University of São Paulo (USP) with a Master thesis about translation as a theoretical practice and is working toward a PhD in the track Translation in the Hispanic and Lusophone World at UMass Amherst. She is also a poet and has published one chapbook and one full-length book. As a poet and performer (she composes ambient music/audio interventions for her poem readings), she is active in the Brazilian scene of contemporary poetry and frequently publishes poems in online and print journals. Some of her work both in poetry and translation has appeared in anthologies from Brazil and Mexico as well. Some of her other academic interests are: English language literature, Latin American literature, semantics, cognitive science and anthropology.