Calvin Olsen holds an MFA from Boston University, where he received a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship to locate and translate the work of the late Mozambican poet, Alberto de Lacerda. He also translates the work of Portuguese poet João Luís Barreto Guimarães, and his translation of Guimarães's collection Mediterranean won the 2020 Willow Run Poetry Book Award and will be published by Hidden River Arts in 2022.

Calvin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, AGNI, Asymptote, The Interpreter's House, The London Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review, among many others. An Idaho native, Calvin now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he is completing a PhD in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media and nine years into his twenty-seven-year pet project, Ten Thousand Haiku—it and his other work can be found at calvin-olsen.com.