Tess O’Dwyer

Tess O’Dwyer is Board Chair of the Academy of American Poets. She runs an eponymous consultancy in New York City providing strategic planning and fundraising counsel to nonprofit leaders in the arts, culture, and social justice sectors. Her client roster includes art museums, libraries, performing arts centers, policy think tanks, research universities, and social justice agencies.

Prior to her consultancy, O’Dwyer served as vice president for cultural affairs at the Americas Society, director of development at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and associate director of individual giving and major gifts at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She earned her MA in English from Rutgers University and is also an award-winning translator of Latin American and Puerto Rican poetry and fiction. Her books in translation include the social realist novel Martín Rivas (Oxford University Press, 2000) by Alberto Blest Gana and the postmodern classics Yo-Yo Boing! (AmazonCrossing, 2011) and Empire of Dreams (Yale University Press, 1994), both by Giannina Braschi. O’Dwyer coedited, with Frederick Luis Aldama, Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). She also served as a coeditor of the journal Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas.

A winner of the Columbia University Translation Center Award, O’Dwyer has served as a Board member of Harvard University’s Cultural Agents Initiative, Evergreen Review, Garden State Film Festival, and PEN America.