Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven's most recent book of poems, The Last Sacred Place in North America, won the 2011 New American Press Poetry Prize and was published in 2012. On the basis of his earlier book of poems, Dust and Bread (Turning Point, 2008), Haven was named 2009 "Ohio Poet of the Year." Haven is also the author of one earlier collection of poems, The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (West End Press, 2004), and of the memoir, The River Lock: One Boy's Life along the Mohawk (Syracuse University Press, 2008). The River Lock was nominated for a National Book Award by Syracuse University Press. A review of The River Lock is available online at http://www.contrarymagazine.com/Contrary/Haven.html

Haven published one other title in 2008, a limited edition chapbook of collaborative translations of contemporary Chinese poetry--The Enemy in Defensive Positions (with Wang Shouyi and Jin Zhong, Poetry Miscellany Chapbooks, University of Tennessee--Chattanooga). He also edited and wrote the introduction for The Poetry of W.D. Snodgrass: Everything Human (University of Michigan Press, 1993), and co-edited two anthologies of contemporary American poetry.

Haven's poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Parnassus, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Literary Imagination, World Literature (Beijing), Image, Crazyhorse, Guernica, The Common, Poetry New Zealand, and in many other journals. He has a Ph.D. in American Civilization (literature, intellectual history, and American art history) from New York University, where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Harold Bloom, and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of Iowa. He is Professor of English and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Ashland University, where he also serves as Director of the Ashland Poetry Press.