Lynn Emanuel

1949 –
Read poems by this poet

Lynn Emanuel was born in Mt. Kisco, New York, on March 14, 1949. She received an MFA from the University of Iowa, an MA from City College of New York, and a BA from Bennington College.

Emanuel is the author of six books of poetry: Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023); The Nerve of It: Poems, New and Selected (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Noose and Hook (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); Then, Suddenly (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), which was awarded the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets; The Dig (University of Illinois Press, 1992), which was selected by Gerald Stern for the National Poetry Series; and Hotel Fiesta (University of Georgia Press, 1984).

About The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected, Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize judges Amy Gerstler, Reginald Gibbons, and Kimiko Hahn write,

Every poem in Lynn Emanuel’s “The Nerve of It” brims with unfailing invention and virtuoso wordcraft. This volume of new and selected poems is a beautifully integrated whole, the arc of a life: heady, bold, vivid, sexy, intensely envisioned, metaphorically brilliant. “The Nerve of It” is a witty and courageous body of work.

In his review of Noose and Hook, David St. John writes,

I have long believed that Lynn Emanuel is one of the most innovative and subversive poets now writing in America. Her aesthetic and artistic choices consistently invoke a complex hybrid poetics that radically reimagines the shape of our poetic discourse.

Emanuel’s honors include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She has taught at Bennington College, Vermont College, and Warren Wilson College, among other institutions. She was a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, where she directed the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers’ Series, which she also founded. She retired in 2018.