Russell Scott Valentino


Russell Scott Valentino is a literary scholar, translator, author, editor, and professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Indiana University. His work has been published by the New York Times, Reaktion Books, The ''Harvard Review, Yale University Press, and a dozen other literary magazines and book publishers. The former editor of The Iowa Review and publisher of Autumn Hill Books, Valentino served on the 2022 jury for the National Book Awards. His translation of Miljenko Jergovic’s Kin'' received AATSEEL’s 2023 Best Prose Translation award.

Biography

Valentino grew up on a small farm in Clovis, California. He received a B.A. from California State University, Fresno and M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1993. A student of Michael Henry Heim, he has published eight book-length literary translations from Italian, Russian, and Croatian and been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for literary translation. His two scholarly monographs focus on Russian literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also co-edited three collections of essays, including, with Sean Cotter and Esther Allen, the 2014 retrospective The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & a Life in Translation. He served as Editor-in-Chief at The Iowa Review from 2009 to 2013, as President of the from 2013 to 2016, and as chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University from 2013 to 2016 and from 2021 to 2025.

Books

Honors