Debora Kuan is the author of three poetry collections, Women on the Moon (The Word Works), Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press), and XING (Saturnalia).
She has been awarded a U.S. Fulbright creative writing fellowship (Taiwan), University of Iowa Writers' Workshop Graduate Merit Fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference work-study scholarship, multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, the NELLE Three Sisters Award, and residencies at Yaddo, Macdowell, and the Santa Fe Art Institute.
Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Boston Review, The Baffler, Fence, The Iowa Review, ZYZZYVA, and other publications, and her writing has appeared in Time, Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Paper Monument, and other magazines. She was included in the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and her poem “Magic Lesson” was anthologized, along with poems by Richard Blanco, Eavan Boland, Billy Collins, Li Young-lee, Natasha Trethaway, and others, in Bedford Freeman Worth’s Advanced Language and Literature, 2nd edition.
She has served as a poetry juror for the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and worked on the editorial masthead of Poetry magazine. She has also been a guest speaker at Hofstra University, Ithaca College, SUNY Potsdam, the Stony Brook Southampton MFA program, and Quinnipiac University. She has taught at the University of Iowa, The College of New Jersey, and the New York Institute of Technology, as well as through Brooklyn Poets and the 92Y.
She was a writer for the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, editing and curating therapeutic practitioner courses on trauma, worthiness, and vulnerability taught by New York Times–bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk, among others.
A former fellow at the CUNY Writers' Institute in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing, she received an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a BA in English literature from Princeton University. She is the former poet laureate of Wallingford, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and children, and works remotely for the MIT Press as head of copywriting.
