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 (UGA 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). Her agent Jennifer Lyons will soon be shopping her 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 has collaborated with musicians to invent a new ways of working through sound together, and with two photographer/visual artists. She’s immersed in a lifelong collaborative reading of Dante’s Commedia, and she is poet in residence with the New Chamber Ballet in New York City. (Read 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 2025-2028 Silvers-Dudley Prizes for literary criticism, arts writing, and journalism.

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