Deborah Landau

Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, including Skeletons (2023); Soft Targets (2019), winner of the 2019 Believer Book Award in Poetry; The Uses of the Body (2015); and The Last Usable Hour (2011), all from Copper Canyon Press; and Orchidelirium (Anhinga Press, 2004), selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry. A Spanish edition of The Uses of the Body was published as Los usos del cuerpo by Valparaiso Ediciones in 2017.

Landau’s work has been published in The Paris Review, Tin House, Poetry, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and The New York Times, and has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Her poems have been widely anthologized in places such as The Best American Poetry 2016, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015), Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books, 2007), Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (Penguin, 2017), The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008), and Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English (Seren, 2009).

Landau studied at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow and earned a PhD in English and American literature. For many years she codirected the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series and cohosted the video interview program Open Book on Slate.com. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Landau is director of the creative writing program at New York University, where she also teaches. She lives in Brooklyn.