Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. She received her BA in literature and women’s studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an MFA at Columbia University.
She is the author of So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016); Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press 2012), which was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Award; Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award.
Shaughnessy is a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship from Brown University, a 2001 Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/US Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She currently serves as an associate professor at Rutgers University–Newark.