Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt, grew up in Bombay and New Jersey, studied in Boston, and now makes her home in New York City.

Books include Happier Far: Essays (University of Georgia Press, March 15, 2025), two poetry collections, Tiny Extravaganzas (Arrowsmith Press, 2023), Forest with Castanets (Four Way Books, 2019), and a study of technique, How to Write Poetry (2005). She will soon be shopping a novel set in 1946-7 India.

Her work has been recognized by fellowships at Civitella Ranieri and Yaddo, the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and the Peter Heinegg Literary Award. She was an editor at A Public Space, PEN America, and Guernica. She publishes poetry, essays, and criticism for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Kenyon Review, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, and A Public Space.

Mehta is collaborating with the world-renowned cellist Frances-Marie Uitti to invent a new way of working through sound together, with the Trinidadian woodwinds player David Bertrand, with two artists on a lifelong reading of Dante’s Commedia, and with a street photographer documenting poverty and a palladium photographer making sun prints of flora. She is poet in residence with the New Chamber Ballet in New York City, and has published a poem about one of the dancers in the New Yorker. She was a judge for the 2024 Derek Walcott Prize with Arrowsmith Press and for the 2025 Silvers-Dudley Prizes for literary criticism, arts writing, and journalism.

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