Joan Larkin

Joan Larkin (born April 16, 1939, in Boston) is an American poet, writer, and teacher. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion of the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.

Education and career Joan Larkin earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Swarthmore College, a Master of Arts degree in English at the University of Arizona, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting at Brooklyn College.

Larkin has served on the faculties of Brooklyn College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Goddard College, and has served as Distinguished Visiting Poet at Columbia College Chicago and the core faculty of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Poetry Writing and Translation at Drew University.

Larkin was a visiting instructor (poet-in-residence) at West Side YMCA Writers Community in New York from 1994 to 1996. In 1975, she co-founded the independent small press Out & Out Books and co-edited the anthologies Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry (with Elly Bulkin). She also received the Poetry Society of America's 2011 Shelley Memorial Award, with Rigoberto González as co-recipient of the award. She received the Publishing Triangle's 2008 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, for her book My Body: New and Selected Poems. In addition, Larkin received the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry twice, in 1989 (for Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, with Carl Morse) and in 1997 (for Cold River). Her anthology of coming out stories, A Woman Like That, was nominated for a Publishing Triangle award and a Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2000. She served as poetry editor for the first three years of the queer literary journal Bloom. She was co-editor, with David Bergman, of the Living Out autobiography series at the University of Wisconsin Press. Her other awards include fellowships in poetry and playwriting from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (1995), New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts (1987–1988), as well as a Creative Artists public service grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1976 and in 1980.