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Stephen Haven’s The Flight from Meaning (Slant Books, 2025) 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. His memoir, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life Along the Mohawk, was published by Syracuse University Press in 2008.
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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, 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 twenty 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 from 2016-2024 and Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Ashland University from 1992-2016.

FEATURED

The Flight from Meaning

Forthcoming from Slant Books in February 2025

According to T.R. Hummer, “Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of a passionate, humanistic ethos.” His poems reflect “concern for humanity, and concern for language, humanity’s best hope.” The poems in Haven’s new collection, The Flight from Meaning, have been shaped by—and serve as responses to—an American predilection for violence, spectacle, and distraction–the ways they flatten and diminish our experience of the world.

For Haven, meaning is something rich, mysterious, and multi-layered, and our apprehension of it can only be sustained by the imagination’s capacity to counter the coercion of a narrow rationalism.The Flight from Meaning contains meditations on American history, on the nature of religion in our time, on racism and its legacy in the post-Civil Rights era, and brings the reader to intimate poems about family in Haven’s industrial hometown in upstate New York, and to poems drawn from years of living and teaching in Beijing, Houston, Cleveland, Boston, and New York City.

In the literary family to which Stephen Haven belongs, his poems embrace both Dickinson and Whitman, Stevens and Frost, Eliot and Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Hass, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Roethke, Pasolini, Rilke, Glück, Trethewey, Levine, Levis, Komunyakaa, and many others who dodge simplistic dichotomies in favor of the way the ear, the eye, the mind and feeling, achieve a lightness of being and a range of meaning that trouble and enrich the heart of human experience.

The Last Sacred Place In North America

Winner of the New American Poetry Prize, selected by T.R. Hummer

“On his own eloquently ruminative, often speedily allusive 'errand into the wilderness’—whether that 'wilderness' be China or America—Stephen Haven discovers the rich textures of landscape, the bewildering array of cultural facts and forces, the colorful detritus of ever-simmering political contradictions, and how all these can inflict and pressure a single alert consciousness, or tinge with elegy the tight nexus of a single family. In their moral questioning and aesthetic awareness, as well as in their practical attentiveness to the variously eccentric world as it is, the precisely pitched poems and translations of The Last Sacred Place in North America provide a vade mecum of enriching meditations for any wakeful voyager.”
~~Eamon Grennan