Biography

News:
Museum of Accidents chosen as one of the five best poetry books of 2009!
Starting Today Anthology available for pre-order!

Rachel Zucker was born in New York City in 1971. The daughter of storyteller Diane Wolkstein and novelist Benjamin Zucker, she was raised in Greenwich Village and traveled around the world with her parents on Wolkstein's folktale-collecting trips. After graduating from Yale with a B.A. in Psychology, Zucker attended the University of Iowa where she received her M.F.A in poetry. Zucker's first full-length collection is Eating in the Underworld (2003), a series of poems that follows the narrative arc of the myth of Persephone. Her second collection, The Last Clear Narrative, (2004) a cross examination of marriage and motherhood. Her third collection, The Bad Wife Handbook is a darkly comic contemplation of married life. Along with poet Arielle Greenberg, Zucker edited, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, (2008) an anthology of essays by younger women poets about mentorship and Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days, which is forthcoming in 2010. Her most recent collection of poems, Museum of Accidents, (Wave Books, 2009) is a really good book. Zucker is the winner of the Salt Hill Poetry Award (1999, judged by C.D. Wright) and the Barrow Street Poetry Prize (2000). In 2002 she won the Center for Book Arts Award (judged by Lynn Emanuel) for her long poem, "Annunciation" which was published as a limited edition chapbook. Her poems have appeared in many journals including: 3rd Bed, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Epoch, Fence, Iowa Review, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner as well as in the Best American Poetry 2001 anthology.

Zucker has taught at Yale, NYU and the 92nd Street Y. From 2005-2007 she was the poet-in-residence at Fordham University where she taught writing and literature classes to undergraduate and graduate students. In the Spring of 2010 she will be teaching a graduate seminar at Columbia.

Zucker is also a certified labor doula, CD (DONA) and has attended 8 births. She has worked as a photographer, day care teacher and gem dealer. She lives in New York with her husband, Josh Goren, and their three sons. She is currently working on new poems, short prose, and a novel for which she has no publisher, no publication date and no clear path torward progress. She is also training to become a certified childbirth educator.