Headshot of the poet Jesse Nathan
Photo courtesy of the poet

Jesse Nathan’s first book of poems, Eggtooth (Unbound Edition Press, 2023), won the 2024 New Writers Award in Poetry and was named a finalist for the 2024 Golden Poppy Award. “Jesse Nathan’s Eggtooth is an ambitious, brilliant rethinking of what making a poem is,” writes Frank Bidart. “Again and again the author makes us feel that we have been present at the creation.”

Nathan’s work has been published in Best American Poetry 2024, TheNew York Review of Books, TheParis Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, The Believer, and Revel. He has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Stanford University, the Arts Research Center at the University of California Berkeley, Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, the Ashbery Home School, and the Kansas State Arts Commission. His translations have appeared in Poetry, Mantis, and Poetry International. 

Nathan’s cotranslations from the Popol Vuh have been published in Poetry and were the subject of a Poetry podcast hosted by Srikanth Reddy. His translations of Alfonsina Storni and other poets have been published in Mantis and Poetry International. 

Nathan was a founding editor of the McSweeney's Poetry Series. With Ilya Kaminsky and Dominic Luxford, he edited In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting on Earth: Poems from Far and Wide (McSweeney’s, 2017). His reviews and interviews appear in the online McSweeney’s series “Short Conversations with Poets.” Nathan was raised in northern California and rural Kansas, and he teaches in the English department at University of California, Berkeley.