Here’s a job title you don’t expect to see on a poet’s résumé: Assistant Dean, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan.
And yet that’s where Ethriam Cash Brammer ended up. This is a guy who published poems called “HWY 86” and “Guácala” in little magazines in the nineties, and who now sits on the senior leadership team of one of the biggest graduate schools in the country. I came across his name through a children’s book, of all things, and the more I read, the more I wanted to understand how he got from there to here.
Starting with the words
The early part of the story is all literature. At UC San Diego he picked up the Steward Prize in Poetry in 1993. Then came an M.F.A. in creative writing at San Francisco State, where his thesis was a pile of poems and prose poems about the border. In 1996 he won the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s fiction contest.
Then Ethriam went teaching. A lot of it. Composition, basic writing, creative writing, and reading classes at Imperial Valley College in California, where he was named Imperial County’s Walmart Teacher of the Year in 1997. If you’ve ever taught remedial writing, you know it’s not glamorous work. You spend your days with students who’ve been told, one way or another, that they aren’t “college material.” That kind of job leaves a mark.
The translator years
Somewhere in there, Ethriam found translation, and I’d argue this is the real hinge of the whole story.
Ethriam worked for the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project at the University of Houston, which hunts down and preserves early Latino writing that nearly got lost. Over the next several years he translated Daniel Venegas’s The Adventures of Don Chipote, Alirio Díaz Guerra’s Lucas Guevara, Alicia Alarcón’s The Border Patrol Ate My Dust, and Conrado Espinosa’s Under the Texas Sun, all for Arte Público Press.
Think about what that job asks of a person. You’re not the author. Your whole task is to carry someone else’s voice, jokes and all, into another language without flattening it. In one essay he wrote about translating Espinosa’s El sol de Texas, the title Ethriam chose for the piece is “‘Keeping it Real.’” I like that. It tells you he wasn’t precious about it.
Two books for kids
Around the same time Ethriam wrote his own children’s books. My Tata’s Guitar is the one that caught my eye. A little boy pokes around his grandfather’s garage and finds an old guitar, then learns it’s played everything from Christmas posadas to campfire songs. The best moment, according to the Reading Rockets description, comes when the grandfather offers to teach him to play. It’s a bilingual book, written for ages three to six.
His second, The Rowdy, Rowdy Ranch / Allá en El Rancho Grande, came out in 2004. In 2005 he got special recognition from the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. And he kept reading to kids long after the books were out, at Detroit libraries, festivals, and Día del Niño celebrations, for years.
Detroit
By 2003 Ethriam was teaching in Detroit, and in 2007 he moved into program leadership at Wayne State’s center for Chicano-Boricua studies, which later became the Center for Latino/a & Latin American Studies. He finished his Ph.D. in English there in 2011, writing about the translator and journalist Teodoro Torres.
This is where the numbers come in, and I’ll say up front that they come from his own CV, so take them as his account. Ethriam reports that first-to-second-year retention among the center’s students went from 48.3 percent in 2004 to 86.8 percent in 2010, and six-year graduation rates climbed from 7.5 to 34.2 percent across cohorts. If that holds up, it’s a huge swing. The program was named an Example of ¡Excelencia! and a national finalist in 2011.
Honestly, that’s what I find most interesting. Ethriam didn’t leave writing behind to chase administration. He kept publishing and translating the whole time. But he also built something that kept students enrolled.
Then Michigan
After a stint running a federal TRIO program for first-generation and low-income students at Eastern Michigan, Ethriam landed at Rackham in 2018. His work there covers strategic planning, fellowships, assessment, and DEI initiatives, including the school’s Anti-Racist Action Plan, which included dropping the GRE for doctoral programs. That last one is debated, and plenty of smart people disagree with it. Whatever you think, it’s a very long way from a poetry reading in San Francisco.
He’s also given back outside the university. Ethriam chaired the executive committee of the Michigan Humanities Council in 2023 and 2024, which isn’t the sort of thing you take on unless you genuinely care what happens to the humanities.
Why it makes sense
You could read all this as a career that zigzagged. I don’t think it did.
A translator’s whole job is making sure one person’s meaning survives the trip into someone else’s world. A decent administrator does something similar: taking what students and faculty actually need and making sure it doesn’t get lost on the way to policy. His own CV hints that he sees the link, with talks titled “Giving Voice: The Intersection of Translation Theory & DEI Advocacy.”
