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A native New Yorker, David Lehman is a poet, writer, editor, and teacher. If you count the 2009 edition of The Best American Poetry (of which he is the series editor), he has three new books this fall. Yeshiva Boys, his latest collections of poems, is out in November from Scribner. The long title poem consists of twelve sections; Lehman began the poem in 1988 and completed it eighteen years later.

In October 2009, Lehman's homage to such songwriters as Harold Arlen, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern was published by Schocken / Nextbook. The book is entitled A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. Following the publication of the book, Lehman has been presenting “lectures with musical illustrations” in New York, Chicago, London, San Francisco, and other places.

Lehman's earlier books of poetry include When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Evening Sun (2002), The Daily Mirror (2000), and Valentine Place (1996), all from Scribner. The Daily Mirror is subtitled “a journal in poetry,” as is The Evening Sun; both books reflect Lehman's habit of writing a poem a day, a project he undertook as an experiment in 1996; he surprised himself by following through on this project for five years. Poems by David Lehman have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry, Boulevard, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many other journals.  His articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared widely. He reviewed books regularly for Newsweek in the 1980s and was a contributing editor of Partisan Review for ten years.

Lehman has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008), and Great American Prose Poems (Scribner, 2003) among other anthologies. Among his six nonfiction books are The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday), Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (Simon and Schuster), and The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection (University of Michigan Press). He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has taught in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City since the program's inception in 1996. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and is the editor-in-chief of The Best American Poetry blog. He lives in New York City.