Laurel Benjamin
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Laurel Benjamin’s new collection, Flowers on a Train, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She is a San Francisco Bay Area poet, active with the Women’s Poetry Salon. She curates Ekphrastic Writers and is a reader for Common Ground Review. Current publications: Pirene’s Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Gone Lawn, Nixes Mate. She received an Honorable Mention for the Ruben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition. Laurel holds an MFA from Mills College. She invented a secret language with her brother.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
Laurel’s writing explores the deep and complex experience as an American Jew in world history. Further, questions of identity, the push against any biological imperative as a frame of identity in being a woman; family relationships, heritage, and cultural identity. In the end, the Yiddish word mishpatim, learning to compromise in an argument, serves as a way to re-construct the guilt, the mistakes, the lack of visibility, the need to survive, and form it into ways of re-imagining both magical and clever.
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
- Of the Book Literary Journal, “In the Middle”, “People Speak Yiddish in Bars All Over Berlin”, “Elegy”
- Taos Journal of Poetry, “Half a Donkey”
- Deronda Review, “Ode for Walking Women”, “Woman Under the Bridge”
- Gone Lawn, “The Starling”
- Rogue Agent, “The Forceps of War”
- Cider Press Review, “A cat’s paw has its own geography”
- West Trestle Review, “The Bird Men”
- Ekphrastic Review, “I grow extra ovaries”
- Dodging the Rain, “Our Own Patois”
- The Shore, “She springs from fissures”
- Bending Genres, “A Different Wish”
- Ekphrastic Review, “Watermelon of Forgiveness” (Pushcart Prize Nominee, 2023)
- Sheila-Na-Gig, “Tearformation”, “They’ll never name a hurricane after me”
- Flapper Press, “Inside Bird”, “Flowers on a Train”, “Alexander Valley” (Best of the Net Nominee, and Interview)
Video Reading
Education
Mills College, B.A.
Mills College, M.F.A.