Carmen Acevedo Butcher is an internationally acclaimed speaker, author, educator, and poet. An award-winning translator, she has made accessible works of Early Modern French, German, Latin, Middle English, and Old English, by writers including the seventeenth-century friar Brother Lawrence, Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, the Cloud’s Anonymous, Julian of Norwich, and tenth-century Benedictine monk Ælfric of Eynsham.

Carmen's translation of Cloud of Unknowing (Shambhala Pocket Library, 2018) won an Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writers Association in 2010. Her tenth book, Practice of the Presence, is a revolutionary translation of the wisdom of Brother Lawrence, releasing in 2022 from Broadleaf Books.

She coauthored a history of the English language textbook with John Algeo, and her essays and poetry appear in Parabola: The Search for Meaning, Christian Century, crossconnect, Cambridge University Press journal English Today, Fulbright Review, poetrynow, Magistra, Old English Newsletter, Sewanee Medieval Studies, Silhouettes in the Electric Sky, Southern Ocean Review, Writing Across Berkeley, and many more.

Carmen has spoken on language, translation, writing, teaching, mysticism, and new media at UC Berkeley, University of London, Sogang University, Chestnut Hill College, University of the South, Southern Women Writers Conference, and others. Her recent radio and news interviews aired on the BBC World Service Compass “Future of English” series, podcasts In Search Of and Wisdom’s Table, and Yahoo Lifestyle. She has been a commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition and Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Georgia Gazette and The Issue. She has also contributed expert commentary for documentaries on medieval literature.

A Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year and President’s Awardee for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship, she also taught as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Sogang University for a year. During her Ph.D. studies in medieval literature at the University of Georgia, she was a Fulbright Scholar at University College London, researching in the British Library, the Bodleian, and other Oxbridge stacks for a year and a half.

While a Rotary Graduate Scholar at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Carmen ate many Dampfnudeln, rode a foldable bike around Heidelberg and the Rhine Rift Valley, and walked Philosophenweg with septuagenarian Sophie Buschbeck. She has chopped coleslaw and fried tater tots at Mrs. Winner’s, cashiered and stocked shelves at a big-box store, volunteered at a maximum-security women’s prison, and been a reporter and photographer for a local newspaper. At present, she is based in the Bay Area, where she is often found among the snowy egrets in the marsh.

Carmen currently teaches in the College Writing Programs at UC Berkeley. Twice a Lecturer Teaching Fellow at Cal, she conducts workshops on inclusive language as praxis, and on collaboration with Gen Z.

I am also a new fan of Mastodon!