Joshua Weiner


Joshua Weiner is an American poet.

Life

He graduated from Northwestern University, and earned his Ph.D in English and American Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
He served as the writing coordinator at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and as a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University.
He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, the novelist Sarah Blake, and two sons, and teaches literature and poetry workshops at University of Maryland, College Park, where he is Professor of English. He is also the poetry editor of Tikkun magazine.
His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, the Nation, the American Scholar, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, B O D Y, Yale Review, Slate, The New Republic, and other journals.

Awards

I've always been impressed by Joshua Weiner's formal intelligence and his sure knowledge of how to make a poem. He's learned as much from Mina Loy, Robert Duncan, and Tom McGrath as he has from Thom Gunn, Thomas Hardy, and George Herbert. His poems are open to many different kinds of aesthetic approaches, including those of jazz and the blues. Like the modernists, he's embraced the past, but unlike some of them, he's alert to the formal possibilities lurking in popular culture. Among the squares, he is hip; among the hip, he is wary. So watch out. His poems are tonal land mines.