
Joan Larkin’s latest book, My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press), received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award. David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times has called Larkin’s voice “unsentimental, ruthless and clear-eyed…. This is poetry without pity, in which despair leads not to degradation but to a kind of grace.” Larkin’s previous books include Housework, A Long Sound, Sor Juana’s Love Poems (co-translated with Jaime Manrique), and Cold River, winner of the Lambda Award for poetry. Larkin co-founded the independent press Out & Out Books as part of the feminist literary explosion of the 1970s and co-edited the groundbreaking anthologies Amazon Poetry, Lesbian Poetry with Elly Bulkin, and Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time with Carl Morse. Her anthology A Woman Like That was nominated for Publishing Triangle and Lambda awards for nonfiction in 2000. Among other awards, Larkin has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing includes two books of daily meditations in the Hazelden recovery series, If You Want What We Have and Glad Day. Now in her fourth decade of teaching writing, she will join the faculty of Drew University’s MFA program in poetry and translation in January. Poet and critic David Bergman has written, “There are few poets in America who can combine Joan Larkin’s formal mastery with her emotional intensity, and so it has been something of a mystery to me why she’s not better known or more widely valued as one of the finest poets in America.”