Will Morningstar '01

What I’ve been up to since Atrium: I went to Milton Academy after my time at the Atrium and then Newton South for high school, where I got into theater and music and had a wonderful time. I ended up at Hampshire College, where I studied anthropology, religion, and translation, focusing on ancient and colonial Mesoamerica. After college, I took a year off to do an internship in California and then came back to attend Harvard Divinity School for a master's in religious studies. I decided not to continue down that path academically and took the first steps toward what would be my eventual career in publishing while still in school. After graduating, I worked at an indie bookstore in Newton as well as a literary agency and started freelance editing on the side.

Currently: I've been a freelance editor and Spanish-to-English translator for several years now, working with a variety of publishers and cultural institutions in the US and Spain, but my main focus is translating literature. I have just signed my first contract to translate a novel (from Argentina), which will come out next year. I translate from a queer feminist perspective, in the hopes of counteracting, in some small way, the disregard that many writers have suffered both in their own countries but also within the already small corpus of texts translated into English every year. Currently, I am embarking on a project to translate a number of mid-twentieth-century women writers from Spain, most of whose books are long out of print even in Spanish. I am also in the midst of co-founding a feminist publishing house that will focus on international literature.

Favorite Atrium memories: The giraffe! (Is it still there?) Singing Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game" every spring. So many wonderful teachers.

Something that has stuck with me from my Atrium education: On a very concrete level, I started learning Spanish at the Atrium. And our Spanish teacher actually taught us some Yiddish too! Probably more importantly, what I got from my time at the Atrium was a love of and comfort with critical thinking and self-directed learning. Atrium showed me very early on how to ask questions that don’t have easy answers, assemble the resources I need to start exploring, and find my own ways of doing things. I’ve had sort of a roundabout path, but it has always led to enriching and exciting places. I think, most of all, my time at the Atrium taught me to never stop learning.