Hailey Leithauser Biography

Poet Hailey Leithauser was born in Baltimore and raised in Maryland and Central Florida. Leithauser has worked as a salad chef, real estate office manager, gourmet food salesperson, freelance copy editor, phone surveyor, bookstore clerk, fact checker, and, most recently, senior reference librarian at the Department of Energy in Washington, DC. Returning to writing after a break of several decades, her work has appeared widely, in publications such as Poetry, Agni Online, Crazyhorse, the Gettysburg Review, the Iowa Review, Meridian, Pleiades, and Best American Poetry.

She is the recipient of the Discovery/The Nation Prize, and an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. In 2012, Leithauser's book, Swoop, won the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she is a coordinator for the Café Muse reading series.