“Best Local Poet” of 2009


Denise Duhamel

FIU’s Creative Writing Professor Denise Duhamel has been named “Best Local Poet” by the “Miami New Times” in its Best of Miami 2009 issue.

Duhamel, whom “Miami New Times” said was “truly contemporary” and “worth reading” writes on her Web site, “I began to read poetry in high school, but I assumed all poets were dead because we only read dead poets. I assumed no one wrote poetry anymore. It wasn’t until college that I began to read contemporary poetry, and it was at that time I switched from writing primarily fiction to writing primarily poetry.”

She is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry. Her most recent titles are “Two and Two” and “Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems.”

In response to Duhamel’s collection “Smile!,” best-selling author Edward Field says, “More than any other poet I know, Denise Duhamel, for all the witty, polished surface of her poems, communicates the ache of human existence.”

A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Duhamel has read her work on NPR and was a featured poet on the PBS Bill Moyer’s special, “Fooling with Words,” in 1999.