Donna Masini

Donna Masini was born in Brooklyn and has always lived in New York City. She attended Hunter College and earned her MFA in poetry from New York University. She is the author of the collections 4:30 Movie (W.W. Norton, 2018), Turning to Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2004), and That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994), which was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Adrienne Rich said, “Donna Masini’s poems are on the wavelength of Whitman and Rukeyser but are inimitable her own: urban, sexual, working-class, passionate, marked by great moral intelligence and generosity. She is one of the marvelous new poets this country is generating in a terrible time.”

Masini’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Open City, TriQuarterly, the Paris Review, Brooklyn Poets, and Renga for Obama. She is also the author of the novel About Yvonne (W.W. Norton, 1997), which the New York Times called “a stunning novel of sexual obsession.” 

Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and a Pushcart Prize. She is a professor of English at Hunter College, where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program.