Lehman, David

David Lehman is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Yeshiva Boys (Scribner, 2009) and When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs  (Nextbook/Schocken, 2009), The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999), The Perfect Murder (Michigan, 2000), and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). He edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, which appeared from Scribner in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. Lehman teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and continues as the annual anthology’s general editor. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 and an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990. His poems appeared in Smartish Pace, Issue 15 and he read in the Smartish Pace reading series in New York on Oct. 4, 2008. He lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.