Daisy Fried
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Daisy Fried was raised in Albany, New York. She received a BA from Swarthmore College in 1989. She is the author of the forthcoming My Destination (Flood Editions, 2026, and Carcanet Press), The Year the City Emptied (Flood Editions, 2022), Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (Pitt Poetry Series, 2013), My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again (Pitt Poetry Series 2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and She Didn’t Mean to Do It (Pitt Poetry Series, 2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships for poetry. She is an occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere and is a member of the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Philadelphia, where she is a member of the local Yetzirah chapter.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
My relationship to Judaism is complex in a particularly American way. My father was, during my childhood, secular. He was raised in an atheist Socialist New York Jewish family. His mother was a first generation American; his father immigrated with his own family as a very young child from what is now Chisinau, Moldova, around the time of the pogroms there, and in response to virulent anti-Semitism. My mother was the descendent of upper class English and working class Scottish protestants. My parents raised us to be aware of both strands of heritage, with more emotional connection developed around Judaism. When I was around 30, my father joined a conservative synagogue and my mother converted to Judaism; a lot of their intellectual, spiritual, and domestic life in the ensuing decades revolved around their membership in the synagogue. Two of my siblings also subsequently converted as adults, one to Orthodoxy from which he has since lapsed, and the other in the Reform tradition. I remain secular and have not converted, and thus I am not a Jew according to some strains of Judaism, but I feel myself to be at least Jewish-adjacent, and find my identification with Judaism strong and strengthening. Am I a Jewish poet? In fact, I don’t think of identity as either object or subject (and often find that identity used as such limits poems’ ability to grasp, or grasp at, complexity) but because my writing emerges from the conditions and preoccupations of my life, there are elements in it, sometimes glancing, sometimes focused, related to Judaism, whether it’s a narrative poem about my Jewish family’s history, a reference to Middle East politics, a reference to a Hebrew prayer, or to an anti-Semitic atrocity of the past.
Published Works
My Destination (forthcoming from Flood Editions and Carcanet Press, 2026)
The Year the City Emptied (Flood Editions, 2022)
Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)
My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006)
She Didn’t Mean to Do It (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
Swarthmore College, B.A.