Elizabeth Clark Wessel is a poet, Swedish to English translator, and small press editor based in Stockholm, Sweden. Born and raised in rural Nebraska, she spent many years living in New York and Connecticut. She received her BA in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in poetry and literary translation from Columbia University, where she taught in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program.
She is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, most recently first one thing, then the other (Per Diem Press, 2018), and translator of numerous books, including Let’s Hope for the Best by Carolina Setterwell, and What We Owe by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde, and The Eighth House by Linda Segtnan, which has been shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize. Her first full-length poetry collection, None of It Belongs to Me, was published by Game Over Books in June 2024, and her forthcoming chapbook Everything Small Is Moving was a winner of the 2025 Spoonfuls Chapbook Contest.
Along with Iris Cushing and E.C. Belli, she is a founding editor of the independent poetry press Argos Books, which has published over forty books since 2010. She served as co-editor of Circumference, a journal of poetry in translation, with Sam Ross, Hilary Vaughn Dobel, and Iris Cushing from 2012-2017.
Photo by Birgit Walsh.
Elizabeth Clark Wessel 