Danielle Pafunda

A native of upstate New York, Danielle Pafunda earned a BA in Russian literature and creative writing from Bard College, an MFA in poetry from the New School, and a PhD in English literature from the University of Georgia. Her books of poetry include Pretty Young Thing (2005), My Zorba (2008), Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (2010), Manhater (2012), and Beshrew (2019). Her work was collected in The Best American Poetry 2004. Pafunda is a board member of Women in Letters and Literary Arts (WILLA), an organization devoted to the advancement of women writers.
 
Pafunda dissects and plays with ideas of the body, using it as a fluid and “shape-shifting” trope in her poems. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Pafunda claimed her interests are in the “great legacy of modernist freakout,” including “horror in the face of global warfare, the dissolution of the marriage between progress and improvement, the emperor's-new-clothes revelation that the self is an ever-shifting and incoherent cuckoo bird, masculine hysteria, cyborgery, civil rights, and all the seeds of the postmodern condition.”
 
Pafunda has taught at the University of Wyoming and is currently an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and English literature at the Rochester Institute of Technology.