Donna Masini was born in Brooklyn and has always lived in NYC. She attended Hunter College and received her MFA in Poetry from New York University in 1988.
Her latest collection of poems Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? explores our bewildering, increasingly fragmented lives in poems rooted in the everyday: the supermarket line, dentist’s office, DMV, or pain relief aisles. Here erupt sudden spiritual questions: What are we without memory? Are clams happy? What is happiness?
Her 2018 collection, 4:30 Movie, is an elegy for her sister, explores personal loss, global violence, the ways in which movies shape our imaginations.
Her first collection of poems, That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994), was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She next published a novel, About Yvonne ( W.W. Norton and Co., 1997) which the New York Times called “a stunning novel of sexual obsession.” In 2004 she published her second collection of poems, Turning to Fiction (WW Norton and Co.)
Of her poems Adrienne Rich has said: “Donna Masini’s poems are on the wavelength of Whitman and Rukeyser but are inimitable her own: urban, sexual, working-class, passionate, marked by great moral intelligence and generosity. She is one of the marvelous new poets this country is generating in a terrible time.”
Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Best American Poetry, Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, TriQuarterly, Paris Review, Brooklyn Poets, et al.
A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, a Pushcart Prize, et al, she is a Professor of English at Hunter College where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program.