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, 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 is shopping a novel set in 1946-7 Mumbai that folds in events from the partitions of India and Palestine.

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, Harvard Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Kenyon Review, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, and A Public Space.

Mehta is collaborating with musicians to invent a new way of working through sound together, 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. A book project is under way. She was judge of the 2024 Derek Walcott Prize with Arrowsmith Press, for which she chose Antonella Anedda’s Historaie, translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart.

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