Professor Clare Sullivan believes that translation is a collaborative act in which we learn from each other. She and her students have engaged in dozens of projects for community clients as diverse as the Luther Luckett Correctional Facility and the Speed Art Museum. She also teaches literary translation and her graduate students have become active researchers themselves, most recently publishing translations of the Tsotsil poet Enriqueta Lunez in the North Dakota Quarterly.

In 2010, Professor Sullivan received a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The book that resulted, The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems (Phoneme Media, 2015), was shortlisted for the National Translation Award. Ugly Duckling Presse published two of her collaborative chapbook translations, El lenguaje es un revólver para dos / Language is a Revolver for Two (2018) by Peruvian Mario Montalbetti and the trilingual New Moon / Luna Nueva / Yuninal Jme'tik (2019) by Tsotsil poet Enriqueta Lunez. In 2017 Cardboard House Press brought out her translation of neobaroque Mexican author Alejandro Tarrab’s Litane. Her translations have been featured in The Asheville Poetry Review, Asymptote, The Iowa Review, and World Literature Today among others.

In 2014, she was invited by US Poets in Mexico to teach a poetry translation workshop in Oaxaca City, Mexico for English-speaking poets. She joined Modern Poetry in Translation for a multilingual Zoom reading to celebrate their special issue If No one Names Us: Focus on Mexico (2021). She collaborated with Stetson University’s MFA Program on a Mexico City Performance Class with Natalia Toledo via Zoom in 2023.