Diana Goetsch

Diana Goetsch is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently In America (Rattle, 2017) and Nameless Boy (Orchises, 2015), which has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. The Job of Being Everybody (Cleveland State University Press, 2004) was selected as the winner of the 2003 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition. She has been anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools (Random House, 2003).

Born in 1963 and after growing up in Northport, Long Island, Goetsch was educated at Wesleyan University and New York University.

She has received the Paumanok award, the John Harms National Reading Prize, a Prairie Schooner Reader’s Choice Award, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and The New School, where she was the inaugural Grace Paley Teaching Fellow.

Goetsch is also a nonfiction writer and columnist, author of the memoir This Body I Wore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), and the “Life in Transition” blog at The American Scholar, which chronicled issues of gender in America, alongside her own transition. For twenty-one years she worked as a New York City public school teacher, at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, and at Passages Academy in the Bronx where she established and ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens. Her acclaimed webinar, Actually Writing, is regularly attended by students on six continents.