Joy Ladin is the author of nine poetry collections: The Future Is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2017), Fireworks in the Graveyard (2017), Impersonation (2015), The Definition of Joy (2012), Coming to Life (2010), Psalms (2010), Transmigration (2009), The Book of Anna (2006), and Alternatives to History (2003). She has also published a memoir, Through the Door of Life: a Jewish Journey Between Genders (2012); a critical study, Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry (2010); and a work of creative non-fiction, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective (2018).

She is a professor at Yeshiva University, where she holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English. She earned a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a PhD at Princeton University. Ladin was awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Non-Fiction Fellowship and a 2016 Hadassah Brandeis Research Fellowship. She was a finalist for the 2009 Lambda Literary Award. She has twice been honored with Forward Fives awards, has received an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship. A nationally recognized speaker on gender and Jewish identity, Ladin has spoken around the country and has been featured on a number of NPR programs, including "On Being with Krista Tippett."