Danielle Pafunda was born in upstate New York. She received her BA from Bard College, where she studied Russian Literature and Creative Writing.

In 1999 she moved to New York City. While in New York, she held several jobs, including assistant to the poet David Lehman, publicist for the famed KGB Bar Poetry Reading Series, and teaching artist for Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She received her MFA in Poetry from New School University in May 2002.

Publications include Best American Poetry 2004; such print journals as Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, Conduit, LIT, and Pleiades; and online journals such as Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Nerve, and Poetry Daily. She is co-Editor of the online journal La Petite Zine and a former Associate Editor of Verse. She now lives in Athens, Georgia, teaching Creative Writing and Composition at the University of Georgia, while pursuing her PhD in English Literature with a Creative Dissertation. She curates Athens’s Vox Reading Series, which showcases both new and established writers, local and visiting. She lives with her husband, their dog, and their cat.

What Others Say

Despite the title, the poems of Pretty Young Thing aren’t cute; these lanky lines mount frankly sensual and emotionally complex curves. The reader is chagrined but not chastened by the kind of engagement Pafunda’s poems demand and win, and by the nearly indecent intimacy with language this poet so clearly enjoys. As these deceptively endstopped poems skein on through the page breaks, the portrait of a subjectivity moving back and forth across the grey, attractive boundaries of contemporary culture begins to take shape. This may be a model subjectivity for our millennial world, the privacy which survives the security sweep because it is made of culture itself.    — Joyelle McSweeney

Daniel Pafunda's Pretty Young Thing gallops, stinks, snarls. Sly, she thinks vinegar things; when the world menaces, she menaces back. Hying from a place where a mother burns the feet off of dolls and uncles make the moves on young girls, the pretty young thing sleeps around while her body attacks itself (sometimes with physicians‚ assistance). Profoundly, in fierce language riddled with regionalisms and puns, Danielle Pafunda's sonnet-skirting poems assert identity's ability to fashion from its own barbed lifelines a self and a force for love.
    —Susan Wheeler

I'm telling everyone to read Danielle Pafunda's Pretty Young Thing. It's that rarest of first collections: one that is unified not only in voice and sensibility but in the unfolding of an inner logic. The radiant whole surpasses the sum of its sexy parts. I'm crazy about this book.
    —David Lehman

Links

Soft Skull: Pretty Young Thing Poems by Danielle Pafunda