Dora Malech, photo © Marco Giugliarelli for Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2019
Dora Malech is a poet, professor, artist, and editor. She is the author of Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018), Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Shore Ordered Ocean (The Waywiser Press, 2009). Flourish was a 2020 longlist finalist for the Julie Suk Award, and Shore Ordered Ocean was a 2010 longlist finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Eris Press (Urtext Ltd) published Soundings, a selection of poems from Malech's first three books and a selection of her visual artwork, in 2019. Tupelo Press commissioned her chapbook Time Trying and published it as a folio in Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic in 2020. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. (See below for a more complete list.) With Laura T. Smith, she edited The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, published by the University of Iowa Press in 2023. With Gabriella Fee, she translated Italian poet Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto’s debut collection, Dolore Minimo, which won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize and was published by Saturnalia Books in 2022. It was a finalist for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for Translation and a longlist finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. As a lyricist, her collaborations with composer Jacob Cooper have been featured on the album Silver Threads (Nonesuch Records, 2014) and Terrain (New Amsterdam Records, 2020). She also wrote the libretto for Cooper and director Karmina Silec's opera THRENOS: for the throat, which won an international 2021 Music Theatre NOW (MTNow) Award.
Malech has been the recipient of an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Fund, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize from the Baker Artist Awards, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and she has been the Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary's College of California and a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome through its Visiting Artists and Scholars Program. She is one of the founders and former director of the arts engagement organization the Iowa Youth Writing Project. Having taught at institutions that include the University of Iowa, Augustana College in Illinois, and the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, she is now an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she has received a Crenson-Hertz Award for Community-Based Learning and Participatory Research, two Arts Innovation Grants, a Dean's Award for Excellence in Service, a Catalyst Award for early career faculty, and a Krieger School Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award. She serves on the advisory board of Writers in Baltimore Schools, and as an associate editor of The Waywiser Press, for which she is also the director of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She is the editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.
Malech has been the recipient of an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Fund, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize from the Baker Artist Awards, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and she has been the Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary's College of California and a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome through its Visiting Artists and Scholars Program. She is one of the founders and former director of the arts engagement organization the Iowa Youth Writing Project. Having taught at institutions that include the University of Iowa, Augustana College in Illinois, and the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, she is now an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she has received a Crenson-Hertz Award for Community-Based Learning and Participatory Research, two Arts Innovation Grants, a Dean's Award for Excellence in Service, a Catalyst Award for early career faculty, and a Krieger School Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award. She serves on the advisory board of Writers in Baltimore Schools, and as an associate editor of The Waywiser Press, for which she is also the director of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She is the editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.
Malech's poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series and Imagine Our Parks with Poems Series, American Letters & Commentary, Anti-, Barn Owl Review, Barrow Street, Bennington Review, Best New Zealand Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Canary, Cellpoems, Chelsea, Columbia Poetry Review, The Country Dog Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Diode, E-Verse Radio, Forklift Ohio, Gargoyle Magazine, Gulf Coast, Hidden City Quarterly, The Hopkins Review, Horsethief, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Jubilat, The Kenyon Review, La Petite Zine, Lana Turner, LARB (Los Angeles Times Review of Books) Quarterly Journal, LIT, Memorious, Modern Language Studies, The Morning News, New England Review, New Orleans Review, The New Yorker, No Tell Motel, Omniverse, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pangyrus, PEN America Poetry Series, Pinwheel, Plume, Poet Lore, Poetry, Poetry International, Poetry London, Post Road, Redivider, The Rumpus, Sawbuck, Sidereal, Smartish Pace, Sonora Review, Sport, Sprung Formal, The Southampton Review, Thermos, Tight, Tin House, Turbine, Two Peach, Versal, Whiskey Island, and The Yale Review. Her visual art and visual poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Pinwheel. Her poems were selected by Natasha Trethewey for Best New Poets 2007, Mark Strand for No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road Magazine, Sherman Alexie for The Best American Poetry 2015, and Tracy K. Smith for The Best American Poetry 2021.