David Yaffe (January 1, 1973 - November 16, 2024) was an American academic, who grew up in Dallas, Texas, where he attended the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.
He received his BA from Sarah Lawrence, and he began writing for The Village Voice while he was a student there.
He taught in the English department from 2005 to 2013, then received tenure from the university, and was an unaffiliated professor of humanities until his death.
Along with Ruth Franklin, he was awarded the 2012 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, presented by the Center for Fiction.
[1] His third book, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (FSG, 2017), was the winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, and a Washington Post Notable Book of the year, 2017.