Anna Rosenwong
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, 2012
September 2019
“It felt kind of like magic,” says Rosenwong, who remembers the moments in which she recognized that reading and writing across languages raises questions about linguistics, literature, and performance. The experience motivated her to study comparative literature as an undergraduate at Brown University, then as an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa, and as a doctoral student at UCI. Today, Rosenwong is a freelance editor, translator, and writer based in San Diego. She and her partner, Tim Rosenwong, who also earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature at UCI, decided to pursue non-academic careers so that they could focus on teaching and editing with more flexibility, while also raising a family in a city of their choosing. “It was a really personal and practical decision,” says Rosenwong, whose translation of Rocío Cerón’s Diorama (Phoneme Press, 2015) won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award.
Rosenwong revels in being able to work on many projects that reach a wide audience. While she continues to write and translate, her primary career focus is facilitating the work of other writers as a developmental editor. “I’m able to bring a very specific and complex intersection of skills,” she explains. “If a novel is a little bit better after I finish working on it, that feels tangible.”
Rosenwong began editing while completing her M.F.A. and encourages others who are interested in editorial careers to do the same. While she acknowledges that there are fewer opportunities to make money from editing in graduate school, Rosenwong sees peer editing in writing groups and workshops as crucial to honing editorial skills and discerning whether to develop those skills beyond the university. “Workshopping other peoples’ translations was my best professional training and confidence-builder,” she says. “Later, when the head of a publishing imprint asked me if I could do that work, I was honestly able to say yes.”
Rosenwong says that getting to do what she loves professionally feels like a luxury, and warns that the road to sustainable freelancing is rocky. “Freelancing is a huge hustle,” she says, and explains that there are many smart, capable—“it feels like disproportionately women”—freelancers working as general editors and copywriters. She encourages aspiring editors to specialize in a particular field to narrow the pool of people competing for the same jobs. By specializing, she says, editors can not only find more employment, but demand higher wages. “I only ever really wanted to be a literature professor,” Rosenwong admits, chuckling. She offers some writing and literary translation courses online, but laments not being able to teach as much as she would like—while balancing editing, translating, and motherhood. She says teaching is the only skill she gained in academia that is underutilized in her current work. “The translating, the editing, the literary studies, and all the ways I’ve worked and thought about big theoretical and critical race issues,” she says. “All of that informs the work that I do. Every part of what I’m interested in, what I care about, and what I studied informs my daily work. And that’s thrilling.”
As a freelancer, Rosenwong shares the world of translation with a broader audience, just as she always intended. She brings the skills she strengthened as an academic to bear on literature, and maintains that translation studies should be a foundational part of comparative literature programs. Ultimately, Rosenwong ended up doing the work that propelled her to study comparative literature in the first place. She stuck to her passions: translation, reading, and writing.