David Lehman (born 1948 in New York City) is the series editor for The Best American Poetry series and a poet. He currently teaches at The New School in New York City.
Career
David Lehman grew up the son of European Holocaust refugees in Manhattan's northernmost neighborhood of Inwood. He attended Stuyvesant High School and Columbia College. He attended Cambridge University in England on a Kellett Fellowship. He later received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University where he was Lionel Trilling's research assistant. Lehman's poem "The Presidential Years" appeared in The Paris Review No. 43 (Summer, 1968) while Lehman was a Columbia College undergraduate. His books of poetry include Yeshiva Boys (FALL 2009), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Evening Sun (2002), The Daily Mirror (2000), and Valentine Place (1996), all from Scribner. Princeton University Press published Operation Memory (1990), and An Alternative to Speech (1986). With James Cummins he has collaborated on a book of sestinas, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2006) and with Judith Hall on a book of poems and collages, Poetry Forum (Bayeux Arts, 2007). Lehman has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Scribner, 2008), and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003), among other collections. He has written six nonfiction books, including, most recently, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook, 2009). His other books of criticism include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998), which was named a "Book to Remember 1999" by the New York Public Library; The Big Question (1995); The Line Forms Here (1992) and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). His study of detective novels, The Perfect Murder (1989), was nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. A new edition of The Perfect Murder, appeared in 2000. In 1994 he succeeded Donald Hall as the general editor of the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series, a position he held for twelve years. With Star Black, Lehman originated and was co-director of the famed KGB Bar Monday night poetry series and co-editor of The KGB Bar Book of Poems (HarperCollins, 2000). Lehman’s work has been translated into sixteen languages, including Spanish, Russian, French, Polish, Chinese, and Mongolian.
He is series editor of The Best American Poetry (Scribner), which he initiated in 1988. He has also edited many other books, including Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems (1987; expanded, 1996), James Merrill, Essays in Criticism (with Charles Berger, 1983), and Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery (1980). He has written on a variety of subjects for journals ranging from the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal to The American Scholar,The Atlantic, Smithsonian and Art in America. He has taught in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City since the program's inception in 1996 and has served as poetry coordinator since 2003.
Lehman has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts He's also received an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. He has taught in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City since the program's inception in 1996 and has served as poetry coordinator since 2003. Lehman divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City.[1]He is married to Stacey Harwood.
Bibliography
- The Best American Erotic Poems (2008)
- Poetry Forum: A Play Poem: A Pl'em (2007) with Judith Hall
- Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2005) with James Cummins
- When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005)
- The Evening Sun (Scribner, 2002)
- The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000)
- Valentine Place (1996)
- The Big Question (1994)
- The Line Forms Here (1992)
- Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991)
- Operation Memory (1990)
- The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection (1989)
- An Alternative to Speech (1986)
References
External links
