Joseph Fasano

Joseph Fasano (born 1982) is an American poet and novelist. Fasano was raised in Goshen, New York, where he attended Goshen Central High School. He earned a BA in philosophy from Harvard University in 2005 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2008.[1] His poem "Mahler in New York" won the 2008 RATTLE Poetry Prize.[2] He has been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors' Prize[3] and the Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition, among other honors.[4] He has taught at SUNY Purchase, Manhattanville College, and Columbia University.[5]

Fasano's poems have appeared in the Yale Review, the Southern Review, FIELD, Tin House, Boston Review, Measure, Passages North, the American Literary Review, and other publications.[6]

In 2011, Fasano's first book, Fugue for Other Hands, won the Cider Press Review Book Award.[7] It was nominated for the Kate Tufts Poetry Award and the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award." His second collection of poems, Inheritance, was released in May, 2014. In 2015, Fasano published Vincent, a book-length poem based very loosely on the 2008 killing of Tim McLean by Vince Li on a Greyhound Bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, on the Trans Canada Highway.[8] His fourth collection of poems, The Crossing, was released in 2018.

Fasano's first novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, was published in 2020 to critical acclaim.[9][10][11][12]

In 2013, the literary magazine Polutona released a selection of his poems in Russian translation.[13]