Douglas Goetsch has taught writing to the gifted, the incarcerated, undergraduates, post-graduates, and continuing education students since the 1980s. For fourteen years he was a member of the English faculty at Stuyvesant High School in New York City; then established and directed the creative writing program at Passages Academy, a network of schools that serves court-involved youth in New York City. He's been on staff at the Stonecoast Writing Conference, The Frost Place, The Dodge Poetry Festival, and for nine years at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Doug's books of poetry include Nobody's Hell (Hanging Loose Press, 1999), The Job of Being Everybody (Cleveland State, 2004), winner of the CSU Poetry Center Open Competition, and four prize-winning chapbooks. He is the recipient of awards from Prairie Schooner, MARGIE, Slipstream, The Chautauqua Literary Journal, two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, many Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Donald Murray Prize for writing on the teaching of writing. His poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The New England Review, online at PoetryDaily and Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, on the air at NPR, and in numerous anthologies.

Doug's poems have been cited for their grittiness, craft, and "wicked good humor." Mark Halliday calls them "free of baloney," and Billy Collins wrote, "It's hard to imagine a reader who could resist Goetsch's seductive opening lines." Of his most recent collection, Your Whole Life (Slipstream Press, 2007), Jeffrey Harrison wrote, "Goetsch can't keep himself from going right to [the] edges, whether he is writing about the entanglements of adult life, the cluelessness of childhood, or, as he so deftly does in several poems, both at once."

Doug received a bachelor's from Wesleyan University and a master's in American Civilization from New York University. Since 2002 he has been the editor of Jane Street Press, a not-for-profit press dedicated to publishing undiscovered masters of contemporary American poetry.