A reading and discussion of new work by poets, translators and editors Jesse Nathan, Benjamin Paloff, and Alissa Valles.

Jesse Nathan’s poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Nation, jubilat, and elsewhere. He’s a founding editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series, and the former managing editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading. Nathan is working on a PhD in English literature at Stanford. He lives in the southeast corner of San Francisco.

Benjamin Paloff is the author of The Politics (Carnegie Mellon, 2011), a collection of poems; his next, And His Orchestra, is forthcoming in early 2015. He has also translated several works from Central and Eastern Europe, most recently Marek Bieńczyk’s Transparency (Dalkey Archive, 2012) and Andrzej Sosnowski’s Lodgings: Selected Poems (Open Letter, 2011). His poems have appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and he writes regularly for The Nation and the Times Literary Supplement, among others. Currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, he teaches at the University of Michigan.

Alissa Valles is the author of Orphan Fire (Four Way Books, 2008) and the editor and co-translator of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems (Ecco), a New York Times Notable Book in 2007, and Collected Prose (2010). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, Boston Review and The New York Review of Books. She has worked for the BBC World Service, the Dutch Institute of War Documentation and the anti-trafficking organization La Strada in Warsaw, and now works as a freelance literary translator and researcher on human rights issues; she lives in Cambridge, MA and the Bay Area.