Chana Bloch, the author of award-winning books of poetry, translation, and scholarship, is Professor Emerita of English at Mills College, where she taught for over thirty years and directed the Creative Writing Program. Her book Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems (2015) includes work from her four earlier collections, The Secrets of the Tribe (1980), The Past Keeps Changing (1992), Mrs. Dumpty (1998), and Blood Honey (2009). She is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs (1995, 2006), The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (1986, 1996) and his Open Closed Open (2000), and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (2009), as well as Yiddish poetry by Jacob Glatstein and Abraham Sutzkever, and short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. She is also the author of a critical study, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (1985). Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, and many literary journals and anthologies.

This series of readings is organized and hosted by Stephen Yenser, poet and professor at UCLA.