Emily Leithauser, MFA, PhD
“Emily Leithauser’s first collection, The Borrowed World, is an elegant meditation on inheritance, the vagaries of love and loss, familial relations—with all the devastating implosions within—and our relationship to the past filtered through the flawed lens of memory. These are deeply felt poems and Leithauser has a finely-tuned ear for the lyricism of syntax and the enduring rhythms of traditional forms. The Borrowed World is her stunning debut.”
— Natasha Tretheway, 2012-2014 U.S. Poet Laureate, author of Thrall and Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir
Emily Leithauser’s first collection of poems, The Borrowed World, was published in 2016 and is the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Prize. She is the recipient of the Grand Prize in Poetry, judged by Vijay Seshadri, for the 2015 Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival. Her poems and translations have appeared in New Ohio Review, Literary Imagination, Literary Matters, Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, and The Common, among other journals. Her scholarship has been published in The Hopkins Review and The Global South. In addition to poetry and poetics, her interests include British and Irish literature, French and Francophone poetry, memory and elegy, and theories of metaphor.
Leithauser studied French History and Literature at Harvard University and earned a certificate in Publishing at the Columbia School of Journalism. Before completing her M.F.A in poetry at Boston University, she worked as an editorial assistant at Palgrave Macmillan in New York. In Boston, she served as the editorial assistant to the poetry editor of The Atlantic. She earned her Ph.D. in English at Emory University, where she also taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor in English and Creative Writing. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana. She lives with her husband, daughter, and two dogs in Shreveport, Louisiana.
