Soft Targets

Deborah Landau is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Her latest collection, Soft Targets (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2020) follows two other Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press in the US, The Uses of the Body (2015) and The Last Usable Hour (2011). Her debut collection, Orchidelirium, was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Soft Targets was widely reviewed in the US, featured on Oprah and in podcasts from Paris Review and The New Yorker (reading and interview with Kevin Young), and was one of Lithub’s ‘Most Anticipated Books of 2019’, Book Riot’s ’50 Must-Read Collections of 2019’, AM New York’s ‘5 New Standout Poetry Books’ and Bustle’s ‘Thirteen Poetry Collections You Need to Read This Spring’. CNN commissioned an op ed piece from her ‘We are all soft targets’ in the light of US inaction on gun control following the latest shootings in August 2019. The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and was included on ‘Best of 2015’ lists by The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A Spanish edition, Los Usos Del Cuerpo, was published by Valparaiso Ediciones in 2017. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Poetry, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, and included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, The Best American Erotic Poems, and Women’s Work: Modern Poets Writing in English. Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.