Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy (born 1970) is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Timess "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an associate professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at Rutgers University–Newark.

Life Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa and grew up in Southern California. She received her BA in literature and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and MFA at Columbia University.

Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, BOMB, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Our Andromeda (2012) was selected as a Library Journal "Book of the Year" and as one of the "100 Best Books of 2013" by The New York Times as well as being shortlisted for both the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize. So Much Synth was published in 2016 by Copper Canyon Press and was named one of the best poetry collections of 2016 by The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. Her fifth book of poems, The Octopus Museum, was published by Knopf in 2019.

She is an associate professor of English in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark. She lives in Verona, New Jersey with her husband, the poet and editor Craig Morgan Teicher, and their children.

Awards 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Our Andromeda, shortlisted for the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Interior with Sudden Joy, which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship.