Joshua Mehigan

Joshua Mehigan's first book, The Optimist (Ohio UP), was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His second book, Accepting the Disaster, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2014.

Born in upstate New York in 1969, he has lived for the past twenty years in New York City, where he is a teacher of English and creative writing.

Mehigan’s poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Poetry, which awarded him its 2013 Levinson Prize. His writing has also been featured on Little Star Weekly, Poetry Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac, and in anthologies such as Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (Penguin) and Bright Wings (Columbia UP).

In 2011, Mehigan was awarded Poetry magazine’s Editors Prize for best feature article of the year, and was also the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.