David Lehman

David Lehman was born in New York City in 1948. He graduated from Columbia College and attended Cambridge University in England as a Kellett Fellow. He is the author of five collections of poems, The Evening Sun (Scribner, 2002), The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000), Valentine Place (1996), Operation Memory (1990), and An Alternative to Speech (1986). His 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. David Lehman has also edited such books as 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 is, with Star Black, co-director of the KGB Poetry Reading Series in New York City. In addition, he is series editor of The Best American Poetry (Scribner), which he initiated in 1988, and is general editor of the University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry Series. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. He is on the core faculty of the graduate writing programs at Bennington College and the New School for Social Research and divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City.