JOSHUA MEHIGAN’s third book, Lines, is forthcoming in 2027–28 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His second book, Accepting the Disaster (FSG), was named a best book of the year by the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. His first book, The Optimist (Ohio UP), was a finalist for the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. He has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Mehigan’s poems have appeared in periodicals including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The TLS, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The Baffler, Smithsonian, and Poetry, which awarded him its 2013 Levinson Prize. His writing has also been featured on Little Star Weekly, Poem-a-Day, and Poetry Daily, and in anthologies such as After Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance (Sarabande), The FSG Poetry Anthology, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (Knopf), Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (Penguin), and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds (Columbia UP). Translations of his poems by Christophe Fricker have appeared in various German periodicals, including Akzente and Krachkultur. He was awarded Poetry magazine’s Editors Prize for best feature article of 2011. 

From 2017 to 2020 Mehigan was an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University. He has also served as a visiting writer at schools including Amherst College, Johns Hopkins, and Goethe University Frankfurt, and teaches at Brooklyn Poets and Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. Mehigan grew up in the Mohawk Valley region of upstate New York. For the past thirty-five years, he has lived in New York City, mostly in Brooklyn, where he has taught at Brooklyn College and other colleges in the City University of New York. He is married to the fiction writer Talia Neffson.