Joan Larkin


Joan Larkin is an American poet, playwright, and writing teacher. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion of the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.

Education and career

Joan Larkin earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Swarthmore College, a Master of Arts degree in English at the University of Arizona, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting at Brooklyn College.
Larkin has served on the faculties of Brooklyn College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Goddard College, and as Distinguished Visiting Poet at Columbia College Chicago. She is a member of the core faculty of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Poetry Writing at Drew University.
Larkin was a visiting instructor at West Side YMCA Writers Community in New York from 1994 to 1996. In 1975, she co-founded the independent small press Out & Out Books and co-edited the anthologies Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry.

Works and themes

Joan Larkin's poetry collections include My Body: New and Selected Poems, Housework, A Long Sound, Sor Juana's Love Poems, and Cold River.
Her writing includes The Hole in the Sheet, a Klezmer musical farce, and two books of daily meditations in the Hazelden recovery series: If You Want What We Have and Glad Day. The Living, her verse play about AIDS, has been produced at festivals in Boston and New York.

Literary prizes

Larkin was the 2011 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. She also received the Poetry Society of America's 2011 Shelley Memorial Award., with Rigoberto González as co-recipient of the award. She received the Publishing Triangle's 2008 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, for her book My Body: New and Selected Poems. In addition, Larkin received the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry twice, in 1989 and in 1997. Her anthology of coming out stories, A Woman Like That, was nominated for a Publishing Triangle award and a Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2000. She served as poetry editor for the first three years of the queer literary journal Bloom. She is co-editor, with David Bergman, of the Living Out autobiography series at the University of Wisconsin Press. Her other awards include fellowships in poetry and playwriting from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, New [York Foundation for the Arts], and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Creative Artists public service grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1976 and in 1980.

Poetry

  • Housework
  • A Long Sound
  • Cold River
  • Sor Juana's Love Poems/ Poemas de Amor ,
  • ''My Body: New and Selected Poems''

Prose

Collections edited

  • Amazon Poetry: An Anthology
  • Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology
  • Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time: An Anthology
  • A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell their Coming Out Stories
  • Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies
  • Women Writers Calendar
  • ''Blood & Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard''

Recordings

  • ''A Sign I Was Not Alone''

Limited editions

  • ‘’A Garden,’’ letterpress broadside
  • ‘’Waste Not,’’ letterpress broadside
  • ‘’Boston Piano,’’ Belladonna limited edition poetry chapbook
  • ‘’Hard Differences,’’ letterpress broadside, American Populist Poetry Series

Plays: staged readings, productions