MB Valente grew up in the woods of northern Idaho and attended Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, before emigrating to Switzerland and later France. She holds a Master’s in Specialized Translation from the University of Geneva. Her literary translations as Margaret Besser have appeared in The Common and Words Without Borders, and she is a submissions reader for Electric Lit’s Recommended Reading.

She is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2024), the AWP Writer-to-Writer mentorship program (2023), the Kenyon Review online literary translation workshop (2022) and the DISQUIET International Literary Program (2019). She was awarded the Sara Patton Stipend for speculative fiction in 2023.

She writes about human–animal ties, interior worlds and (mis)communication across and within languages.