Joan Larkin

Last updated
Joan Larkin
Born1939 (age 8485)
Massachusetts, United States
Occupationpoet, playwright, teacher
Website
www.joanlarkin.com

Joan Larkin (born April 16, 1939 in Boston) is an American poet, playwright, and writing teacher. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion of the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.

Contents

Education and career

Joan Larkin earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Swarthmore College, a Master of Arts degree in English at the University of Arizona, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting at Brooklyn College.

Larkin has served on the faculties of Brooklyn College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Goddard College, and as Distinguished Visiting Poet at Columbia College Chicago. She is a member of the core faculty of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Poetry Writing at Drew University.

Larkin was a visiting instructor (poet-in-residence) at West Side YMCA Writers Community in New York from 1994 to 1996. In 1975, she co-founded the independent small press Out & Out Books and co-edited the anthologies Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry (with Elly Bulkin).

Works and themes

Joan Larkin's poetry collections include My Body: New and Selected Poems, Housework, A Long Sound, Sor Juana's Love Poems (translated with Jaime Manrique), and Cold River.

Her writing includes The Hole in the Sheet, a Klezmer musical farce, and two books of daily meditations in the Hazelden recovery series: If You Want What We Have and Glad Day. The Living, her verse play about AIDS, has been produced at festivals in Boston and New York.

Literary prizes

Larkin was the 2011 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. She also received the Poetry Society of America's 2011 Shelley Memorial Award., with Rigoberto González as co-recipient of the award. She received the Publishing Triangle's 2008 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, for her book My Body: New and Selected Poems. In addition, Larkin received the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry twice, in 1989 (for Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, with Carl Morse) and in 1997 (for Cold River). Her anthology of coming out stories, A Woman Like That, was nominated for a Publishing Triangle award and a Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2000. She served as poetry editor for the first three years of the queer literary journal Bloom. She is co-editor, with David Bergman, of the Living Out autobiography series at the University of Wisconsin Press. Her other awards include fellowships in poetry and playwriting from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (1995), New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts (1987-1988), as well as a Creative Artists public service grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1976 and in 1980.

Bibliography

Poetry

Prose

Collections edited

Recordings

Limited editions

Plays: staged readings, productions

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