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.
Her first full-length poetry collection, None of It Belongs to Me, was published by Game Over Books in June 2024, and her fifth chapbook Everything Small Is Moving was a winner of the 2025 Spoonfuls Chapbook Contest. Other chapbooks include first one thing, then the other, which was a winner of Daniel Handler’s Per Diem Press chapbook prize in 2018. She is also 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.
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 