About Me

Stephen Haven is a poet, professor, memoirist, translator and editor who was raised in the Mohawk Valley (upstate New York) and has lived in many cities, including Boston; New York City; Iowa City; Amsterdam, New York; Houston, Texas; Waco, Texas; Ashland, Ohio; Cleveland, Ohio; and Beijing, China. His fourth collection of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was a finalist for the International Beverly Prize for Literature and is forthcoming from Slant Books in spring 2024. His third collection of poems, The Last Sacred Place in North America, was selected by T.R. Hummer as winner of the New American Poetry Prize (New American Press). For an earlier collection of poems, Dust and Bread, he won the 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year award. He has published poems in American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, The American Journal of Poetry, Arts & Letters, The European Journal of International Law, Blackbird, Guernica, Image, Literary Imagination, World Literature, North American Review, The Southern Review, and in many other journals. He received grants and residency fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. Haven was the founding director of the Ashland University MFA in Creative Writing Program, where he served as director for ten years. Later he served as director of the Lesley University MFA in Creative Writing Program. Haven was also editor or director of the Ashland Poetry Press for more than 20 years, where he published 60+ volumes of poetry. He currently lives in Weymouth, Massachusetts, a few miles south of Boston, and teaches as Core Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Lesley University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.