Diana Senechal was born in Tucson and holds a Ph.D in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. Her translations have appeared in publications such as The New York Review of Books, The Partisan Review, Orient Express, 2B: A Journal of Ideas and Metamorphosis. Her selected translations of Tomas Venclova, Winter Dialogue, first appeared with Northwestern University Press in 1997, and a selection of these were republished in The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). Her translations of other poems by Tomas Venclova appear in The Grove of the Eumenides (Bloodaxe Books, 2025) which is co-translated with Ellen Hinsey and Rimis Uzgiris. Her translation of Gyula Jenei’s Mindig más (Always Different: Poems of Memory) was published in 2022 by Deep Vellum. She has also translated selections by Anna Akhmatova, Bella Akhmadulina, Marina Tsvetaeva and Aleksandr Kushner from Russian. She has been an invited participant at the International Miłosz Festival and PEN International. She was awarded the Hiett Prize in the Humanities in 2011. Her most recent books include Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (2018) and Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (2011), both from Rowman & Littlefield. From 2011 to 2016 she taught, advised, and led the philosophy program at Columbia Secondary School; she now teaches English and civilisation at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok, Hungary. Her teaching and performance work has been featured in The New York Times. In addition to teaching and writing, she gives talks on education and culture, memorises poetry in various languages, and bikes through the Hungarian plains and hills. She has been living in Hungary since 2017.
