Donna Masini

Donna Masini was born in Brooklyn and has always lived in NYC. She attended Hunter College and received her MFA in Poetry from New York University in 1988. She teaches undergraduate workshops in poetry and fiction, and she is on the poetry faculty of the graduate MFA program, teaching workshops, classes in craft and poetics, and Thesis 1 and 2. In addition, she has taught graduate literature classes in Whitman, Dickinson, and 20th Century American Women Poets.

She is the author of three collections of poetry, 4:30 Movie (WW Norton and Co. 2018), Turning to Fiction (WW Norton and Co., 2004) and That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994), which was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poet's Prize. Her novel, About Yvonne (W.W. Norton and Co., 1997), has been translated into several languages and praised as “a stunning novel of sexual obsession” by The New York Times.Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 2015, APR, Open City, Ploughshares, Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Parnassus, Boulevard, Lyric, et al. She is also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, a Pushcart Prize, et al.

She is working on her next collection of poems, In Cahoots. You can learn more about her writing by visiting her website.

"Donna Masini's poems are on the wavelength of Whitman and Rukeyser but are inimitably her own: urban, sexual, working-class, passionate, marked by great moral intelligence and generosity.  She is one of the marvelous new poets this country is generating in a terrible time." Adrienne Rich