About

Denise Newman is a poet and translator whose work bridges languages, landscapes, and forms. With a deep interest in the poetics of translation, she helps students explore the layered textures of language, silence, and meaning.

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Newman’s poetry collections are Future People, The New Make Believe, Wild Goods, and Human Forest. Her fifth collection, The Redesignation of Paradise, was published by Kelsey Street Press in 2025. She is the translator of the novels Azorno and The Painted Room by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen, and by Naja Marie Aidt, Baboon and When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book, a semi-finalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Kirkus Award. She has received two PEN awards and two NEA Fellowships in translation. Her poems, collaborations, and translations have appeared in Chicago Review's 75th Anniversary Anthology, Denver Quarterly, Fence, New American Writing, 6 x 6, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and critical essays on poetry off the page projects have been published in World Literature Today.

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Newman is also involved in video, installation, and social practice projects that explore language and poetics, and for many years, she has been collaborating with composers, providing lyrics for choral works that have been performed internationally and recorded on labels such as Other Minds Records. Newman is a recipient of a 2014 Creative Work Fund grant; with Hazel White, she created a collective poetry project at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley, building off the installation they made there as part of the interdisciplinary group show Natural Discourse.