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Donna Masini

Donna Masini

Professor
Areas of Interest
Creative Writing, Contemporary Poetry
Website
donnamasini.com

Donna Masini is a professor in the Department of English.

See Contact Details

Profile

Donna Masini was born in Brooklyn and has always lived in NYC. She attended Hunter College and received her MFA in Poetry from New York University in 1988. She teaches undergraduate workshops in poetry and fiction, and she is on the poetry faculty of the graduate MFA program, teaching workshops, classes in craft and poetics, and Thesis 1 and 2. In addition, she has taught graduate literature classes in Whitman, Dickinson, and 20th Century American Women Poets.

She is the author of three collections of poetry, 4:30 Movie (WW Norton and Co. 2018), Turning to Fiction (WW Norton and Co., 2004) and That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994), which was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poet's Prize. Her novel, About Yvonne (W.W. Norton and Co., 1997), has been translated into several languages and praised as “a stunning novel of sexual obsession” by The New York Times.Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 2015, APR, Open City, Ploughshares, Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Parnassus, Boulevard, Lyric, et al. She is also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, a Pushcart Prize, et al.

She is working on her next collection of poems, In Cahoots. You can learn more about her writing by visiting her website.

Educational Background

  • MA, New York University

Selected Publications

Cover image for 4:30 Movie
4:30 Movie
Donna Masini

Award-winning poet Donna Masini explores personal loss, global violence, the preoccupations of our daily lives, and the consolations of art as she brings her wit, grief, fury, and propulsive energy to bear on our attempts to bargain with endings of every kind.

"Urgent, varied poems… playful, surprising and sad by turns, or meditative."
Washington Post
Cover image for Turning to Fiction
Turning to Fiction
Donna Masini

Daring and witty, erotic and searching, these poems explore the ways we suffer and are changed by our losses.

"Think about sex," this book begins, then moves through the places into which our longings lead us. Here are confessions whispered over the phone in "Phone Sex," sins recounted to priests, "pretend confessions" told to a sister. Here are poems about a mother teaching a daughter to read, a girl trying to read her mother, a woman trying to read lovers, and marriage, and herself.

"Every page of Donna Masini’s new book bears the unmistakable signature of character: here she is, all of a piece, a vital and sexy speaker, wry and tender, wounded and indomitable, her body mind and heart held in the big, indifferent embrace of the only city that could be hers. These poems are pure New York, which is simply a way of saying they’re fully human, alive as the avenue."
Mark Doty
Cover image for About Yvonne
About Yvonne
Donna Masini

"I have been stalking my husband's lover," claims Terry Spera, the obsessive, humorously edgy narrator of this intelligent and highly erotic tour de force, an auspicious debut novel The Washington Post hailed as "wonderfully impressive." Literally following in the footsteps of the young woman with whom she is certain her husband is having an affair, Terry eventually enters Yvonne's apartment, her closet, her medicine cabinet―and her life. As she strives to maintain a semblance of normalcy with her husband, Mark, a SoHo art dealer, Terry, and the reader, veer from certainty to uncertainty. Is Mark really having an affair?

With breathless energy, a deeply engaging voice, and a searing sensuality, Donna Masini illuminates the dim and fragmented terrain of a woman's inner life with the wit and passion of a dazzling literary talent. About Yvonne is a compelling, witty, beautifully written story of New York at the end of this century and of a woman at the end of her rope.

"A haunting novel of sexual obsession."
The New York Times Book Review
Cover image for That Kind of Danger
That Kind of Danger
Donna Masini

Poems deal with city life, human sexuality, work, the immigrant experience, family life, and religion.

"Donna Masini’s poems are on the wavelength of Whitman and Rukeyser but are inimitably her own: urban, sexual, working-class, passionate, marked by great moral intelligence and generosity. She is one of the marvelous new poets this country is generating in a terrible time."
Adrienne Rich

Contact Details

Donna Masini

English
68th Street West 1223
(212) 772-5166
dmasini@hunter.cuny.edu

HUNTER

Hunter College
695 Park Ave NY, NY 10065
(212) 772-4000

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