Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven's fourth collection of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was published by Slant in 2025. The flight from Meaning was a finalist (in earlier form) for the International Beverly Prize for Literatre. 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 (Twelve Winters Press). His memoir, The River Lock: One Boy's Life Along the Mohawk, was published by Syracuse University Press in 2008.

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 Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Crazyhorse, Guernica, American Journal of Poetry, Arts & Letters, The Common, Blackbird, European Journal of International Law, Missouri Review, North American Review, 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 the program 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 20 years.