Esther Allen is an Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Baruch College, CUNY, and the Executive Director of the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University. She has directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund since its inception in 2004, and was co-founder, with Michael Roberts and Salman Rushdie, of PEN World Voices: the New York Festival of International Literature. She edited and contributed an article to To Be Translated or Not To Be, a joint publication of International PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull. She has translated a number of books from French and Spanish, including the Penguin Classics anthology José MartÃ: Selected Writings.