Bio
Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger (YesYes Books) and the chapbooks The Rest of the Body (YesYes Books) and The Umbrian Sonnets (PANK). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2015 Scotti Merrill Memorial Award and the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a Kundiman fellowship, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri, Saltonstall Arts Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. Jay holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia. He leads the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program and teaches in the MFA programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.
“Deshpande tracks those moments when we become strange to ourselves, when indecision and failure wrench us open. He writes with a kind of glowing, dreamlike clarity about desire, distraction, regret—the ways we rush past ourselves, the ways we hurt each other. ”
Books
Love the Stranger
A Poets & Writers top debut of 2015.
The Umbrian Sonnets
Chapbook from PANK Books.
The Rest of the Body
Chapbook from YesYes Books.
Recent Poems
American Poetry Review
Jewish Currents
The New Republic
New England Review
Poem-a-Day
Hyperallergic
Teaching
I believe that writing is a form of thinking: when we explore what we can say, we discover who we may become.
Experience
Universities:
Columbia University School of the Arts
Sarah Lawrence College MFA Program
Stanford University Creative Writing Program
Fashion Institute of Technology
Rutgers University–New Brunswick
Arts Organizations:
Poets House
The Academy of American Poets
Hudson Valley Writers Center
Brooklyn Poets
The Unterberg Poetry Center at 92Y
Newsletter
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