I’m a fiction writer and translator from Polish.

You can read an excerpt of my novel here.

I was a 2024-2025 Emerging Translation Fellow at the National Centre for Writing (UK) working with Sean Gasper Bye. Read my recent publication in Words Without Borders!

My projects include translating Zofia Nałkowska’s first novel Women (1906), a forgotten feminist classic, as well as poet Maja Demska’s first collection Playacting People (2022), originally published by Girls and Queers to the Front, a small press in Warsaw. I am open to freelance work and samples.

I’m a PhD candidate at CUNY Graduate Center.

My dissertation is on Polish writer and painter Józef Czapski and Marcel Proust. I teach Polish literature at Hunter College, with a focus on modern and contemporary works and translation studies. I was the 2024-2025 Teacher-in-Residence at the Proust Center at the NYPL.

You can reach me at mmzaleska@gmail.com.

In the past…

I taught in the English department at Brooklyn College from 2016-2023: seminars in 18th and 19th century literature, creative writing, introductions to literature and film as well as composition.

I was fiction editor at Newest York, where I published emerging local writers whose work features the city.

I completed an MFA in fiction writing at Brooklyn College in 2017. I was the fiction and web editor at the storied Brooklyn Review where I edited PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winning fiction.

I have been a volunteer and organizer at The Bridge Series on translation at The Center for Fiction and at Still Waters in a Storm.

I began my teaching career as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant to Poland after graduating from Swarthmore College, teaching English at the University of Rzeszów.