Through her poetry, translation, and fiction, Idra Novey relishes playing in the space between languages. Novey graduated from Barnard College in 2000 and then traveled throughout South America, where she became fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese. She went on to earn an MFA from Columbia University while both writing her own poetry and serving as a translator of Latin American authors. She published her first book of poetry, The Next Country, in 2005 and won the National Poetry Series Prize for Civilian in 2011. She is set to release a new poetry collection, entitled Soon and Wholly, in September 2024. Of her numerous translations, she is best known for The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector, which was published in 2012. In 2016 she published her debut novel, Ways to Disappear, about an American translator who goes in search of a beloved, missing Brazilian novelist. Ways to Disappear won several book prizes and was a finalist for the LA Times Book of the Year. Since then, she has published Those Who Knew (2018), which was named as a Best Book of the Year by many media outlets, and Take What You Need (2023), a New York Times Notable Book. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, and Poets and Writers, as well as the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize and the Pushcart Prize. Alongside her writing and translation career, Novey has taught creative writing at New York University, Fordham University, Columbia University, and the Bard Prison Initiative, and as of 2024, is teaching at Princeton.