Amanda Powell

AMANDA POWELL, poet and translator, teaches Latin American and Spanish literature and literary translation at the University of Oregon. Her research on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers began in Madrid, where she lived after graduation from college with a grant to research unknown women writers of Sor Juana's period. Thinking that this would require extensive research, she was surprised when women's manuscripts and books almost fell off bookshelves at the Biblioteca Nacional and other archives; these convent writers were “unknown” because few had bothered to look at their work. On return to the United States, Amanda and Electa Arenal met on an elevator en route to a meeting of Feministas Unidas of the Modern Language Association, and one chat revealed shared fascination with these texts. Their thirty-plus year collaboration, still going strong, set off a change in the study of “golden age” Spanish and Latin American literature by presenting “missing” women writers presumed nonexistent. Prior to teaching at U. Oregon, Amanda worked as bilingual interpreter in a feminist women's health clinic and editor of Spanish textbooks and materials for educational exchange, always writing poetry, researching and translating.

Amanda has received awards for poetry, translation and scholarship including the Massachusetts Poetry Foundation Fellowship, Oregon Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship, Oregon Humanities Center Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, and Fideicomiso para la Cultura México-EUA. Her translations and poems appear in scholarly and creative journals and anthologies. She has published scholarly and critical essays on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and Colonial Latin American women writers; convent writings and lyrical texts; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; the “boom” in women's love poetry to women across Europe in the seventeenth-century; and literary translation.

Website: http://rl.uoregon.edu/