JOSHUA MEHIGAN's first book, The Optimist (Ohio UP), was a finalist for the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. In 2014, Farrar, Straus and Giroux  published his second book, Accepting the Disaster, cited in the TLS, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere as a best book of the year. He was the Alan Collins Fellow at the 2015 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and has received writing fellowships in recent years from the National Endowment for the Arts (2011) and the Guggenheim Foundation (2015). 

Mehigan has lived for the past thirty years in New York City, where he has taught English and creative writing at Brooklyn College, College of Staten Island, and other colleges in the City University of New York system. He is a workshop instructor for Brooklyn Poets, a literary nonprofit, and a faculty member of Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference, and has served as a visiting writer at schools including Amherst College, Johns Hopkins, and Goethe University Frankfurt. From 2017 to 2020 he was an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University.

Mehigan’s poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, The Village Voice, The New Republic, and Poetry, which awarded him its 2013 Levinson Prize. His writing has also been featured on Little Star Weekly, Poem-a-Day, and Poetry Daily, and in anthologies such as The FSG Poetry Anthology, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (Knopf), Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (Penguin), and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds (Columbia UP). Translations of his poems by Christophe Fricker have appeared in various German periodicals, including Akzente and Krachkultur. In 2011, Mehigan was awarded Poetry magazine’s Editor's Prize for best feature article of the year.