David Lehman

The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Scribner, 2008), and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003).

David Lehman (born June 11, 1948) is an American poet, non-fiction writer, and literary critic, and the founder and series editor for The Best American Poetry.

He was a writer and freelance journalist for fifteen years, writing for such publications as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

Born in New York City on June 11, 1948, David Lehman grew up the son of European Holocaust refugees in Manhattan's northernmost neighborhood of Inwood.

He attended Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England on a Kellett Fellowship.

On his return to New York, he received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia, where he was Lionel Trilling's research assistant.

The poem was awarded Columbia's Van Rensselaer Poetry Prize in 1967.

Lehman's poem "The Presidential Years" appeared in The Paris Review No. 43 (Summer 1968) while he was a Columbia undergraduate.

In 1970 he was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Lehman taught at Brooklyn College, where he shared an office with John Ashbery, for a year.

For four years starting in 1976, he was an assistant professor of English at Hamilton College, teaching courses in literature and creative writing and chairing the college's lecture committee, bringing prominent speakers to campus.

In 1980 he received a post-doctoral fellowship from the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

He then left academe and became a freelance writer.

He wrote numerous book reviews and articles for Newsweek and contributed to such other publications as the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Book World, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He became a contributing editor of Columbia College Today in 1982 and of Partisan Review in 1986.

In 1987 he joined the board of the National Book Critics Circle and was named vice president in charge of programs and events.

In 1988 he founded "The Best American Poetry" annual anthology series.

The Perfect Murder (1989) and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991) were his first nonfiction books.

His study of detective novels, The Perfect Murder (1989), was nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Princeton University Press published Operation Memory (1990), and An Alternative to Speech (1986).

Lehman's other books of criticism include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998), which was named a "Book to Remember 1999" by the New York Public Library; The Big Question (1995); The Line Forms Here (1992) and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991).

A new edition of The Perfect Murder appeared in 2000.

He collaborated with James Cummins on a book of sestinas, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and with Judith Hall on a book of poems and collages, Poetry Forum (Bayeux Arts, 2007).

In 2006, Lehman served as Editor for the new Oxford Book of American Poetry.

Further, Lehman has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Since 2009, new poems have been published in 32 Poems, The Atlantic, The Awl, Barrow Street, The Common, Green Mountains Review, Hanging Loose, Hot Street, New Ohio Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry London, Sentence, Smartish Pace, Slate, and The Yale Review.

Lehman's poems appear in Chinese in the bilingual anthology, Contemporary American Poetry, published through a partnership between the NEA and the Chinese government, and in the Mongolian-English Anthology of American Poetry.

Lehman's work has been translated into 16 languages overall, including Spanish, French, German, Danish, Russian, Polish, Korean and Japanese.

In 2013, his translation of Goethe’s "Wandrers Nachtlied" into English appeared under the title "Goethe’s Nightsong" in The New Republic, and his translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s "Zone" was published with an introductory essay in Virginia Quarterly Review.

The translation and commentary won the journal's Emily Clark Balch Prize for 2014.

Additionally, his poem, "French Movie" appears in the third season of Motionpoems.

Lehman is the series editor of The Best American Poetry.

In October 2015, he published Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, which Geoffrey O'Brien in "The New York Review of Books" praised as an "engaging, playful, deeply personal, and elegantly concise tribute."

Lehman made his living primarily as a journalist and free-lance writer for fifteen years.

He taught and was the Poetry Coordinator at The New School in New York City until May 2018.

Lehman's books of poetry include Playlist (2019), Poems in the Manner Of (2017), New and Selected Poems (2013), Yeshiva Boys (2009), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Evening Sun (2002), The Daily Mirror (2000), and Valentine Place (1996), all published by Scribner.

The prestigious annual series has 33 volumes published (including special tenth and twenty-fifth anniversary editions); the current (2019) volume was edited by Major Jackson.

He is the author of nine nonfiction books, including, most recently, "One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir" (2019), "Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (2015), and "The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014" (2015). A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook, 2009) received a 2010 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Sponsored by the American Library Association, Lehman curated, wrote, and designed a traveling library exhibit based on A Fine Romance that toured 55 libraries in 27 states between May 2011 and April 2012 with appearances at three libraries in New York state and Maryland.

In an interview published in Smithsonian Magazine, Lehman discusses the artistry of the great lyricists: “The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy ... these lyricists needed to work within boundaries, to get complicated emotions across and fit the lyrics to the music, and to the mood thereof.

That takes genius.”