Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven’s The Flight from Meaning was a finalist (in earlier form) for the International Beverly Prize for Literature. He has three earlier poetry collections, The Last Sacred Place in North America, selected by T.R. Hummer as winner of the New American Poetry Prize; Dust and Bread, winner of the Ohio Poet of the Year award; and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks, runner-up for the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry in a year Levine served as judge. Together with Wang Shouyi, Li Yongyi, and Jin Zhong, in 2021 he published the 300-page, dual language (Mandarin and English) anthology of collaborative translations, Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields: Poems from Contemporary China (Twelve Winters Press). His memoir, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life Along the Mohawk, was published by Syracuse University Press in 2008.

Haven’s Ph.D. is from NYU, where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Harold Bloom. His MFA in Poetry is from the University of Iowa. Haven’s work has appeared in The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Literary Imagination, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Salmagundi, The American Journal of Poetry, Arts & Letters, The Common, Blackbird, The European Journal of International Law, Literary Imagination, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Northwest Review, Image, The Montreal Review, Western Humanities Review, World Literature Today, and in many other journals. He is the founding director of the low-residency MFA Program at Ashland University, in Ashland, Ohio, where he served as director for ten years. He later directed the low-residency MFA Program at Lesley University. For many years he taught American literature at both Ashland University and Lesley University. He also served as editor or director of the Ashland Poetry Press for more than 20 years.

Twice a year-long Fulbright Lecturer at universities in Beijing, Haven has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Djerassi Foundation, as well as five Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council. He was Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, from 2016-2024, and Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Ashland University from 1992-2016.