Dora Malech was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1981 and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. She earned a BA in Fine Arts from Yale College in 2003 and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. She has been the recipient of a Frederick M. Clapp Poetry Writing Fellowship from Yale, a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship from the Writers’ Workshop, a Glenn Schaeffer Award in Poetry, and a Writer’s Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, Poetry, Best New Poets, American Letters & Commentary, Poetry London, and the Yale Review. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa; Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand; Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. She lives in Iowa City.

Other poems by Dora Malech in Verse Daily:
November 2, 2009:   "City Beach" "Your mouth said so long from so long said high..."
June 7, 2008:   "Oh Grow Up" "First thing's first aid and off-track..."
March 22, 2005:  "Small Ending" ""Each bird a yard bird..."

Books by Dora Malech:

Other poems on the web by Dora Malech:
"Heaven"
"Forever Hold Your Peace, Speak Now Or"
"Note To So Sorry For Self"
"Go, Touch And"
"Pop Quiz"
Two poems
"Makeup"
"Here Name Your"
"Where Babies Come From"
"Face for Radio"
Two poems
"Score"
"Spectrum"
"Fiddler's Money"
"Hush Money"
"Inventing the Body"
"How It Will Happen, When"

About Shore Ordered Ocean:

"These are wonderful poems. Dora Malech knows just about everything there is to know about the risky music that lives in language. But she also knows about Truth and Beauty. She’s far too wise to try and make these last two rhyme, but she constantly tempts them into conversation."
—Bill Manhire

"If you’d wondered where the dappled things had gone, how the tisket and tasket ended up, what the fickle, freckled, couple-colored pieces of life were up to, look no further. Dora Malech has woven them into her exuberant debut. And she’s stuck in too the x-rays of Zeus and the horns of Moses. Shore Ordered Ocean is by turns witty and wonderstruck, fragile and fierce. Best of all, it announces an extraordinary talent to be watched and cherished."
—J. D. McClatchy

"Inquiring, irreverent, reverent, enraptured, Dora Malech is that rare thing, the magician technician, and she has written a book in which a sudden segue in poetry takes place — from Hopkins to the present. The result is as breathtaking as a dove release. She knows every word in the world is a book, that every center sought and found is continually thrown off, that the muscular is fragile and vice-versa, yet none of her old soul knowledge is ponderous, predictable, or dull, for she remains in love with that essential playfulness which is the innocence of art. Here is Malech on the birth of a child: ‘... unfold all / those origami limbs to test / the inevitable debutante bawl.’ This book is an astonishing debut, one that makes me feel our original, lost language has found its way home."
—Mary Ruefle