I’m a fiction writer and translator from Polish.

You can read an excerpt of my novel here.

I’m currently a 2024-2025 Emerging Translation Fellow at the National Centre for Writing (UK) working with Sean Gasper Bye.

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 am also 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 courses.

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.