Denise Duhamel

Born and raised in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, poet Denise Duhamel earned a BFA at Emerson College and an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. She lived in New York City from 1985 until 1999.

Duhamel has published numerous collections of poetry, including Second Story (2021), Scald (2017), Blowout (2013), which was a finalist for a National Books Critics Circle Award, Ka-Ching! (2009), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (2001), all of which were published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and Kinky, published by Orchises Press in 1997. Citing Dylan Thomas and Kathleen Spivack as early influences, Duhamel writes both free verse and fixed-form poems that fearlessly combine the political, sexual, and ephemeral.

She co-edited, with Nick Carbó, Sweet Jesus: Poems about the Ultimate Icon (The Anthology Press, 2002), and, with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007). Duhamel has also collaborated with Seaton on several poetry collections, including Caprice (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), Little Novels (Penguin, 2002), Oyl (Pearl Editions, 2000), and Exquisite Politics (Northwestern University Press, 1997).

Duhamel’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her work has been included in several volumes of Best American Poetry, where she was a guest editor in 2013, and has also been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Bill Moyers’s PBS poetry special Fooling with Words.

A distinguished university professor at Florida International University, she lives in Hollywood, Florida.