Dorothea Lasky

Dorothea Lasky was born on March 27, 1978, in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her BA from Washington University and continued her studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she received her MFA. She has also earned a master’s degree in arts and education from Harvard University and a PhD in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania.

Lasky is the author of six books of poetry: The Shining (Wave Books, 2023); Milk (Wave Books, 2018); Rome (Liveright, 2014); Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012); Black Life (Wave Books, 2010); and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). She has also authored numerous chapbooks and pamphlets, including The Blue Teratorn (YesYes Books, 2012); Matter: A Picturebook (Argos Books, 2010); Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010); and Art (H_NGM_N Books, 2005). She coedited, with Dominic Luxford and Jesse Nathan, the book Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013).

“In lines that remind me of the way William Carlos Williams insisted that only the imagination gives us access to reality,” poet Julia Bloch writes, “Lasky’s poems evoke a practice of living, as bloody and awful and lovely as living can ever be.”

In 2013, Lasky was named a Bagley Wright Lecturer at Harvard University. She currently lives in New York City, where she is an associate professor of poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.