Brett Alan Sanders is a literary translator, writer, and retired teacher living in Tell City, Indiana. Between 1991 and 2013 he taught Spanish and English at Perry Central Junior-Senior High School where, starting in the 2004-05 school year, he also sponsored an extracurricular literary club and helped launch the student literary journal The Jolie Rouge. He earned a BA in Spanish (with an English minor) at Indiana University and an MALS at the University of Southern Indiana, where he is also co-winner of the 2005 Louis Schewe Essay Award. He placed second in Sunstone’s 2006 Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Contest and is a runner-up for the 2015 X. J. Kennedy Award for Non-Fiction. He is a member of the Southern Indiana Writers.
His translations from the Spanish have appeared in a variety of journals including Chelsea, The Saint Ann’s Review, Artful Dodge, The Antigonish Review, Stand, Event, Contemporary Verse 2, Hunger Mountain, Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Rosebud, and The Cincinnati Review; in a bilingual edition by Host Publications of María Rosa Lojo’s collection of prose poetry Esperan la mañana verde (Awaiting the Green Morning, 2008); as well as in Aliform Publishing’s first English-language edition of Lojo’s award-winning novel La pasión de los nómades (Passionate Nomads, 2011). The bilingual edition of Argentine American poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio’s Todos somos Whitman/We Are All Whitman was published in 2016 by Arte Público Press. Sanders’s essay “On the Creative Art of Literary Translation appears in the Fall 2010 edition of Confluence.
Sanders has also been a contributing writer at Tertulia Magazine, where for “Tertullian’s Blog” he wrote the occasional column “Arte Retórica,” as well as at New Works Review (where subsequently he put in a brief stint as managing editor) and at The Quill & Ink. He has also placed original work in other online sources including River Walk Journal, Passport Journal, and Potomac: A Journal of Poetry and Politics and in such print venues as Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Spectacle, The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies (now Confluence), and Insights, a publication of the John Dewey Society. His Young Adult novella A Bride Called Freedom was published in 2003 in a bilingual edition by Ediciones Nuevo Espacio; in 2005, at the literary/historical conference “In the Times of Eduarda and Lucio V. Mansilla” sponsored by the Junta Provincial de Historia de Córdoba (Argentina), he presented a reading – subsequently published by that organization – from the Spanish-language translation by Sebastián Bekes.
The novella, “A Bride Called Freedom,” has since been revised and forms part of the collection of fiction and essay/memoir called The Captive and the Prince: Tales of Freedom and Courage (Per Bastet Publications, 2021). He is also the author of Confabulating With the Cows: Wit, Whimsy, and Occasional Wisdom from Perry County, Indiana: 1992-94 (Per Bastet Publications, 2017), a collection of newspaper columns.
He has also written three works that he considers fit for publication, but which have not yet found representation or publisher: 1) an account of travel in Argentina, Journeys and Digressions: An Epistolary Memoir; 2) a collection of short fiction, No One Assured in God; and, 3) a novel, Bronze Angel Dancing. Selections from Journeys and Digressions and No One Assured in God have appeared in print and online in a number of literary journals, including in Rosebud which published his essay, “Attractions of Barbarity, or Dreaming a Complete Argentina” (adapted from Journeys and Digressions), runner-up for the X. J. Kennedy Award.
Personal Information
Name: Brett Alan Sanders
Birth: November 21, 1958
Profession: Writer/Literary Translator/Retired Teacher
Address: 520 10th Street, Tell City, IN 47586
E-mail: brettalansanders@gmail.com Website: http://www.brettalansanders.wordpress.com
Education
University of Southern Indiana, Evansville – Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS), 2010.
Indiana University, Bloomington – Graduated August 1988: BA in Spanish minor in English; teacher certification in 1990.
Personal Employment
Freelance writer/translator, starting as primary occupation in 2013.
Spanish/English teacher at Perry Central Jr.-Sr. High School, Leopold, Indiana, 1991-2013.
English/ESL teacher with Houston (Texas) Independent School District, 1990-91.
Honors/Presentations
Honorable Mention, for “Attractions of Barbarity, or Dreaming a Complete Argentina,” (essay), in the 2015 X. J. Kennedy Award for Non-Fiction.
Winner of a 2010 grant, through its Programa Sur translation program, from the Ministry of Foreign Relations, International Commerce, and Culture of the Argentine Republic, for Aliform Publishing’s first English-language edition (2011) of Passionate Nomads, by María Rosa Lojo.
Second-place winner, for “The Golden Boy of Rosario,” of the 2006 Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Contest.
Presenter, from the Spanish-language translation of A Bride Called Freedom (novella), at the July 2005 literary/historical congress “En tiempos de Eduarda y Lucio V. Mansilla” in Córdoba (city and province), Argentina. Proceedings of the congress published in September 2005 by the sponsoring Junta Provincial de Historia de Córdoba.
Co-winner, for “On the Critical Art of Recreational Reading: Why Americans Don’t Read,” of the 2005 Louis Schewe Essay Award, University of Southern Indiana.
Presenter, “Between the Fire and My Heart” (essay), at the 1994 Chicago Sunstone Symposium.
Department of Spanish and Portuguese Departmental Award, Indiana University, 1988.
Honorable Mention, for “The Metafictional Diaries of a Teenage Suicide” (short story), in the 1987 Myrtle Armstrong Undergraduate Fiction Prize, Indiana University.
Winner, for “Quetzalcoatl” (short story), of the 1987 Ellen Wilson Memorial Award, National Society of Arts and Letters, Bloomington Indiana Chapter.
Memberships/Positions
Member, Southern Indiana Writers, starting 2014.
Managing editor of online literary journal New Works Review, 2008-09.
Contributing writer at Tertulia Magazine, 2006-2010.
Faculty advisor for Perry Central Jr.-Sr. High School literary magazine (The Jolie Rouge; originally: The Black Pearl), 2004-05 school year to 2012.
Brett Alan Sanders 
BAS: this is just to let you know, my version of the first four tablets of Gilgamesh is now available on Lulu. Here is the link to order: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/AmpersandPress. Hope you order and enjoy!! Thanks, Eric