Josephine Yuearned an MFA from Georgia State University and a PhD from Florida State University. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Ploughshares, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets 2008, and Old Flame: From the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine. She won the Ploughshares 2013 Emerging Writers Contest and has been honored with Meridian's 2010 Editor's Prize, the New Letters 2010 Poetry Award, and the New Letters 2010-2011 Readers Award for Poetry. She lives with her husband in Tallahassee, Florida.

Books by Josephine Yu:

Other poems on the web by Josephine Yu:
Two poems
"Prayer to Saint Joseph: For the Restless"

Josephine Yu on Twitter.

About Prayer Book of the Anxious:

"In Josephine Yu's debut collection you'll find weeping and gnashing of teeth and profound loneliness, in words that 'throb on the page like nerves.' There's also a belief in transformation, and in moments that can only be called grace: the upwelling tenderness for strangers, getting stoned behind the school library; embracing a lover from behind as he washes the dishes. For Yu, 'the god of despair' is 'the father of the god of attention,' and these poems are marvelously attentive to the shifting tides in the self as it performs its daily offices of sorrow and love."
—Kim Addonizio

"Yu's poems show brilliant range; they are startling and stirring, comedic and then breathtakingly brutal. This is one transcendent collection!"
—Julianna Baggott

"This beautiful collection begins with a poem about lying, to which one says, 'Yippee!' A poet's lies beat today's headlines hollow, and Josephine Yu has assembled here a cast of winsome, slightly off-center characters to help with all that prevarication: a lepidopterist who lives alone, a fortune teller who knows she'll never marry, saints and dreamers of every kind. So many poetry collections are monotone--not this one. A hundred voices bubble out of these pages, each one beseeching you to listen. You'd be crazy not to."
—David Kirby