Artist Profile

Dora Malech 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). 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. A chapbook of her poetry titled Time Trying was recently commissioned for the anthology Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic (Tupelo Press, 2020).
 
Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry International, and The Best American Poetry. Her lyrical collaborations with composer Jacob Cooper have appeared on both of his albums, Terrain (New Amsterdam Records, 2020) and Silver Threads (Nonesuch Records, 2014), and her libretto for Cooper and director Karmina Šilec’s opera Threnos: for the Throat had its world premiere at Operadagen Rotterdam in 2020, performed by the Carmina Slovenica choir. Her visual art has appeared in publications that include Pinwheel, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest. She blogged about poetry, poetics, and pedagogy for The Kenyon Review from 2015-2018, and she is now working on a book of prose about poetic form. With Laura T. Smith, she is currently co-editing a collection of American sonnets and essays on the American sonnet tradition, under contract with the University of Iowa Press.
 
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 a co-founder 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 assistant 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, and a Catalyst Award for early career faculty. She serves on the advisory board of Writers in Baltimore Schools and as an associate editor of The Waywiser Press and Tupelo Quarterly.