David Lehman encyclopedia topics

Career

David Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006). He has written six collections of poems: When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Evening Sun (Scribner, 2002), The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000), Valentine Place (1996), Operation Memory (1990), and An Alternative to Speech (1986). In addition, he collaborated with James Cummins to produce a book of sestinas entitled Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (2005). His 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). His study of detective novels, The Perfect Murder (1989), was nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

He is series editor of The Best American Poetry (Scribner), which he initiated in 1988, and is general editor of the University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry Series. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. He is on the permanent faculty of The New School and teaches a freshman honors class at New York University and divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City.