Danielle Blau

Danielle Blau’s debut full-length poetry collection peep was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the 2021 Anthony Hecht Prize and was published in April of 2022 in both the US and the UK by the Waywiser Press. Her nonfiction book Rhyme or Reason: Poets and Philosophers on the Problem of Being Here Now is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Blau’s mere eye was selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award and published with an introduction by D.A. Powell, and her poems won first place in the multi-genre Narrative 30 Below Contest. Poetry, short stories, articles, and interviews by Blau appear in The Atlantic, Australian Book Review, The Baffler, The Literary Review, Narrative, The New Yorker’s book blog, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Saint Ann’s Review, several volumes of the Plume Anthology of Poetry, and elsewhere.

Her work has been set to music by composers of various stripes and performed in such venues as Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Carnegie Hall. A graduate of Brown University with an honors degree in philosophy, and of New York University with an MFA in poetry, she curates and hosts the monthly Gavagai Music + Reading Series in Brooklyn, teaches at Hunter College in Manhattan, and lives with her son Kai in Queens.