Brad E. Leithauser (born February 27, 1953) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. After serving as the Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College and visiting professor at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he is now on faculty at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
Biography
Leithauser was born in 1953 in Detroit, Michigan. He is an alumnus of the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He worked for three years as a research fellow at the Kyoto Comparative Law Center in Japan. Leithauser has lived in Japan, Italy, England, Iceland, and France. He was married to the poet Mary Jo Salter for many years (they divorced in December 2011) and previously taught at Mount Holyoke College. In January, 2007, Leithauser joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Leithauser's work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Time, The New Yorker, and The New Criterion.
He is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.
Leithauser is the uncle and godfather of Hamilton Leithauser, lead singer of The Walkmen.
Awards and grants
Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant
MacArthur Fellowship
1982 Guggenheim Fellowship
1984 Younger Poets Award from Academy of American Poets
Medal of the Order of the Falcon (awarded by the President of Iceland)
Bibliography
Poetry collections
Hundreds of Fireflies Knopf, 1982, Cats of the Temple, Knopf, 1986, The Mail from Anywhere, Knopf, 1990, The Odd Last Thing She Did, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998,
Novels
Equal Distance, Knopf, 1985; New American Library, 1986, Hence, Knopf, 1989 Seaward, Knopf, 1993 The Friends of Freeland, A.A. Knopf, 1997,
Darlington's Fall: A Novel in Verse, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, The Art Student's War, Random House Digital, Inc., 2009, The Promise of Elsewhere, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019,
Essay collections
Penchants and Places, A.A. Knopf, 1995
Edited volumes
The Norton Book of Ghost Stories (1994)