Daniela Gioseffi

Daniela Gioseffi was born on February 12, 1941, in Orange, New Jersey. The child of Italian immigrants, she received a BA from Montclair State University in 1963 and an MFA from the Catholic University of America in 1973. With a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts, she created the first Brooklyn Bridge Poetry Walk in 1971.

In 1979 Gioseffi published her first poetry collection, Eggs in the Lake (BOA Editions). She is the author of several additional books of poetry, including Blood Autumn/Autumno Di Sangue: Poems New and Selected (Bordighera Press, 2006), Going On: Poems (Bordighera Press, 2000), and Word Wounds and Water Flowers (Bordighera Press, 1995).

In addition to writing poetry, Gioseffi has also edited a number of collections, including Women on War: An International Anthology of Writings from Antiquity to the Present (Simon & Schuster, 1988), which received an American Book Award and was reissued by The Feminist Press in 2003. She has also published several works of prose, including In Bed with the Exotic Enemy: Stories and Novella (Avisson Press, 1997) and The Great American Belly Dance (Doubleday, 1977), a novel.

In 2007, she received the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Known for her work as an educator and environmental activist, she has taught and organized many environmental readings and seminars, and she was a charter poet in the Poets-in-the-Schools program. She currently serves as the editor of Eco-Poetry.org and lives in Brooklyn, New York.