Diane Mehta

Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt and raised in Bombay and New Jersey. She emigrated to the United States when she was seven years old and earned an MA in poetry from Boston University. She is the author of a poetry collection Forest with Castanets (2019), longlisted for the Sophie Brodie medal, and How to Write Poetry (2008), an educational commission by Barnes & Noble Books. 

A lyric poet, Mehta is interested in the ways sound creates meaning, and with experiments in rhythm in the American sentence. Moving against and within tradition, she often addresses issues of faith, time, women, and family history. Of Forest with Castanets, a reviewer in Publishers Weekly wrote, “Eschewing narrative, the soundscapes Mehta creates begin to mirror the history portrayed, while offering new meanings through provocative fragmentation of syntax. Lyrical phrasing fills the collection with “a rapture ruptured” as Mehta explores her own cultural background, Indian Jainism and American Judaism.” 

Mehta was a Kirby-Mewshaw fellow at Civitella Ranieri in 2021. She was the founding managing editor of A Public Space, and launched and edited Glossolalia for PEN America to publish writing from traditionally underrepresented languages. She was also executive nonfiction editor for Guernica magazine. 

Mehta’s poetry, criticism, and essays has appeared or will appear in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Agni, Kenyon Review, A Public Space, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, VQR, the Common, and the Paris Review Daily. She has written poems on commission for arts organizations, including the NYC Ballet and the Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn. She won a Café Royale 2020 grant for her nonfiction writing, and her essays have been shortlisted for the Chatauqua prize and Pushcart Prize. 

Mehta lives in Brooklyn, where she is a freelance writer.