Melody Makeda Ledwon
Melody Makeda Ledwon is a multi-directional translator (AAL/German/English), interpreter, and educator based in Berlin. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Africana Studies and Sociology from Hunter College, City University of New York, and a master’s degree in Education from Washington University in St. Louis.
Her work moves between languages and geographies, tracing multilingual, feminist Afrodiasporic narratives. Her (co-)translations include Vierhundert Seelen: Die Geschichte des Afrikanischen Amerika 1619–2019 (Penguin Random House, 2024), Angela Y. Davis: Eine Autobiographie (Aki, 2023), and HALLO, UND TSCHÜSS, KOKO, COME IN (Theater der Welt, 2023). She is currently working on the Knives, Tongues, the English translation of the novel Messer, Zungen by Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner, excerpts of which have appeared in World Literature Today and are forthcoming in The Common.
Melody understands her translation practice as a space of possibility and connection—where complex Black characters, futures, and ways of seeing the world are affirmed. This vision emerges in resistance to hegemonic translation archives that have long erased and distorted Black literature. Outside her translation work, Melody is a fiction editor at SAND Journal. In 2020, she founded the Black Translators Network—a space for connection and resource-sharing among Black translators working in Germany and beyond.
Melody is the recipient of the 2025 Words Without Borders Momentum Grant. Prior to her work in storytelling, Melody worked in reproductive justice and health equity—counseling, managing grants, and teaching yoga to expand access to quality healthcare for Black, Brown, poor, and queer communities. From 2014 to 2020, she founded and led BPOC Community Yoga Berlin, an inclusive space for communities of color to reclaim rest, movement, and healing.