_edited.jpg)
Rachel Edelman
she/they
poet
Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee who writes into diasporic living. Dear Memphis, their debut collection of poems, was published by River River Books in 2024. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, The Seventh Wave, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and many other journals. They have received material support from City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Academy of American Poets, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House and finalist commendations from the Adrienne Rich Award, the Pink Poetry Prize, and the National Poetry Series. Edelman earned a BA in English and geology from Amherst College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where embodiment and care root her personal, poetic, and pedagogical practice.
About Their Work:
What “odd survival” does Rachel Edelman’s writing conjure? In narrative or lyric, pondering the intricacies of a Memphis Jewish past, recognizing and refusing the bargains coded in family portraits, anatomizing the perversely difficult cultivation of butterfly ova, these poems both question and insist on the poet’s understanding of vitality and sterility. Like the elaborate, inconclusive but often illuminating Talmudic texts to which Edelman alludes, the poet stages an ongoing debate between what she sees, thinks, remembers and perceives. And she phrases the debate in language that is crisp and clear as “the flick that shoos the crow” but “scares off a chickadee.” Full of such phrasing, the poems have a scrupulous strength.
Follow On:
@rachelsedelman on Instagram, Twitter/X, and BlueSky
Website(s):
Books (for purchase):
Dear Memphis (River River Books, 2024)
Online Work:
We Meet at the Well: Miriam, Hagar, and Me in Lilith
The Portrait in West Branch
Return and other poems in Narrative
Read for Margin Shift: