Daisy Fried

Daisy Fried was raised in Albany, New York. She received a BA from Swarthmore College in 1989.

Fried is the author of The Year the City Emptied (Flood Editions, 2022); Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (Pitt Poetry Series, 2013); My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again (Pitt Poetry Series 2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and She Didn’t Mean to Do It (Pitt Poetry Series, 2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Of The Year the City Emptied, poet Jennifer Moxley has written,

There’s a lot of fake anger out there, masking dangerous fear. Daisy Fried gives us the real thing: anger born of despair, love, desire, injustice, and loss. She’s a grave robber, revivifying the corpse of [Charles] Baudelaire to mess with him and help her to cope. His ghoulish presence accompanies her as she haunts Philadelphia, ‘that old worker,’ recording riots, suffering, stench. This book has killer atmosphere, fragrances fine and foul. It growls with the cavernous hunger of our ‘graveyard Nation’ mid-pandemic […].

Fried has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Fried is an occasional reviewer for the New York Times and other publications, as well as poetry editor for Scoundrel Time magazine. She served as the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. She is also a member of the faculties of the MFA programs for writers at Warren Wilson College and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.