Description:

Creative Writing alumni reading series: Joshua Weiner, class of 1985

About Joshua Weiner:

I'm a poet living in Washington D.C. with my wife, the novelist Sarah Blake, and our two boys. Poems are the main work, but I've also written criticism in the form of essays, book reviews, notes, lectures & talks (a lot of that stuff can be found on the links page of this website). Since 2001, I've been teaching full time at the University of Maryland, College Park. I'm also the poetry editor at Tikkun magazine, where I've served on the editorial staff since 1989.

I was born in Boston in 1963, and grew up in Lawrenceville, a small town in New Jersey. Graduated from Northwestern University in 1985. I took the local toll road through graduate school at Berkeley, and got off with a PhD in 1998, having written a master's thesis on Thomas McGrath, and a doctoral dissertation on Mina Loy. Along the way, I detoured through a residency fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where I also served as the Writing Coordinator for three years; I'm still on the Writing Committee there.

In 2001, University of Chicago Press published my first book, The World's Room. Shortly thereafter, I received a Whiting Writers Award and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. From the Book of Giants (2006) received the Larry Levis Award from Virginia Commonwealth University. I spent several years after that editing a book of essays, At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (2009); (you can find a link on this website to a digital exhibit of Gunn's archived materials instrumental to my finishing that book). In 2012, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship brought us to Berlin for the year. My third book of poems, The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish, came out in March 2013 from Chicago (the publisher of all my books).

In 2014, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship helped me make progress on some translations of German poetry (Goethe, Rilke, Nelly Sachs, Ernst Jandl, Jan Wagner ). In the fall 2015, while a research associate at IES Institute's Berlin Centre, I wrote the Berlin Notebook, about the refugee crisis in Germany and Europe; it posted daily in February 2016 at The Los Angeles Review of Books. LARB will publish an expanded edition of the Notebook as an e-book in summer of 2016.