Jesse Nathan was raised in northern California and rural Kansas. His first book of poems, Eggtooth, was published by Unbound Edition Press in 2023. The collection won the 2024 New Writers Award in Poetry. It also won the 2024 Housatonic Book Award.
Eggtooth was Peter Campion’s first acquisition for the press, and the collection includes a foreword by Robert Hass. One poem in the book, "Dame's Rocket," was selected for the Best American Poetry 2024, published by Scribner. The book was a finalist for the Golden Poppy Award, the Northern California Book Award, the Medal Provocateur/Eric Hoffer Award, and the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. 
 
Nathan’s poetry has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, The Believer, Zyzzyva, and the inaugural issue of Revel, among other magazines. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Stanford University, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley, Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, the Ashbery Home School, and the Kansas Arts Commission. He's a 2024 LABA Bay Area Fellow. He is the 2024 Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf.
 
Marie Mutsuki Mockett calls Nathan’s poems “incredibly beautiful,” and Katie Ford describes Eggtooth as “one of the newborn wonders of the world.” These are poems, writes Major Jackson, “written to reverberate through the ages.” “Jesse Nathan’s Eggtooth is an ambitious, brilliant rethinking of what making a poem is,” says Frank Bidart. “Again and again the author makes us feel that we have been present at the creation.”
 
Nathan’s translations from the Popol Vuh, done with his brother-in-law Juan Coy Tení and nephew Josué Coy Dick, have appeared in Poetry, and they were the subject of a Poetry podcast hosted by Srikanth Reddy. He's made translations of Alfonsina Storni and Brenda Solís-Fong with his sister, Daagya Dick, and these have appeared in Mantis and Poetry International. Nathan was a founding editor of the McSweeney's Poetry Series. He contributes occasional prose to the New York Times. 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. Nathan’s reviews and interviews appear in the series “Short Conversations with Poets,” published online by McSweeney's. He's represented by Rob McQuilkin at Massie & McQuilkin.

He's taught poetry in the Kenyon Review Online Workshops, at Bread Loaf, and online at the 92Y. Nathan teaches in the English Department at UC Berkeley.

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