Mira Rosenthal is an American poet and translator of Polish-language writers such as Tomasz Różycki, Małgorzata Lebda, and Krystyna Dąbrowska. Her work has been nominated twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize as well as for the Derek Walcott Prize, the National Translation Award, and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter won the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Found in Translation Award for the best book translated from Polish in 2024. She is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection and finalist for the INDIES Book of the Year award, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Northern California Book Award, a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Her essays, poems, and translations appear regularly in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, The New York Review of Books, Harvard Review, PN Review, Threepenny Review, A Public Space, and Oxford American. You can listen to her read her work at the 92nd St. Y, Slate, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, and Stanford Storytelling Project’s “Off the Page.”
Raised in northern California, Rosenthal earned her B.A. from Reed College, her M.F.A. from the University of Houston, and her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Indiana University. She served on the Board of Directors of the American Literary Translators Association for five years. She has taught creative writing, literature, and translation at various universities, including as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College and as a Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and lives in the small coastal town of Los Osos, CA.
Mira Rosenthal 