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Best American Poetry 2015 Highlights Work by Professor Donna Masini

Best American Poetry 2015 Highlights Work by Professor Donna Masini

Donna Masini

Donna Masini ’84, esteemed member of the MFA creative writing faculty, is one of the outstanding writers represented in Best American Poetry 2015, an annual selection of groundbreaking works. Published on September 8, by Simon and Schuster, the anthology is culled from electronic and print journals to introduce readers to fresh, compelling new voices, as well as established poets.  Masini’s selected poem, “Anxieties,” which consists of eleven couplets and a final singlet – a kind of anagram word scramble – was originally published in 2014.
 
Masini’s first book of poetry, That Kind of Danger, received the Barnard Women’s Poet Prize. She is also the author of poetry collection Turning to Fiction and two novels, About Yvonne and The Good Enough Mother. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and other leading literary journals, and she has been awarded an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
 
A Hunter alumna, Masini received an MFA in poetry from New York University and returned to Hunter as one of the graduate writing program’s founding professors, serving as a program director. A New York native, she has over the years taught undergraduate Hunter workshops in poetry and fiction, as well as graduate literature classes in Whitman, Dickinson, and 20th-century American women poets.
 
In selecting Masini’s work for Best American Poetry, this year’s editor, writer and filmmaker Sherman Alexie, echoes the appraisal of the poet Adrienne Rich, who called Masini “one of the marvelous new poets this country is generating.”  Rich describes Masini’s poems as “inimitable” in their reflections on urban, working-class life, and “passionate, marked by great moral intelligence and generosity.”

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