Tess’s translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Montaigne, Maja Haderlap, Lutz Seiler, and Anne Weber.  Her essays and reviews have appeared in journals and newspapers including The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal, Partisan Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Miami Herald, Bookforum, World Literature Today, and The Hudson Review. 

Tess was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.  She was a 2021-22 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and a 2023-24 Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris.  

Tess has been awarded grants from PEN USA, PEN UK, and the NEA, a Max Geilinger Translation Grant for her translation of Philippe Jaccottet, the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Prize for her translation of the novel Angel of Oblivion by the Austrian writer Maja Haderlap.  In 2023, She received the Friedrich Ulfers Prize, which recognizes those who ‘champion the advancement of German-language literature in the US.’

Tess is a Trustee of the American Academy in Berlin.  She has served on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle and as Co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee. Since 2003 she has been an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review.  

Tess was educated at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.