Mónica Gomery
Rabbi and Music Director, Kol Tzedek Synagogue
Biography
Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi. Her most recent collection, Might Kindred, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry, judged by Kwame Dawes, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Hilda Raz, and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2022. She is also the author of the poetry collection Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poems have been awarded the Sappho Prize for Women Poets and the Minola Review Poetry Contest, and have been featured on the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day and Ours Poetica. In 2022, the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center created a limited edition chapbook of Gomery’s new work for their Poets In Print series. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Four Way Review, Muzzle Magazine, Adroit Journal, The Iowa Review, Poet Lore, and Poetry Northwest. Gomery was raised in Boston and Caracas by her Venezuelan Jewish family, and lives on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia. She was as ordained at the rabbinical school of Hebrew College in 2017, serves currently as Rabbi and Music Director at Kol Tzedek Synagogue, and teaches on the faculty of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva.
Published Works
Poetry
Might Kindred (University of Nebraska Press, 2022)
Collected Poems (chapbook; Kalamazoo Book Arts Center, 2022)
Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018)
Of Darkness and Tumbling (chapbook; YesYes Books, 2017)
Links to Sample Works
- Waxwing, “Granddaughter Casting Afternoon Shadows”
- Palette Poetry, “Occupational Hazards”
- So To Speak, “Emblanquecer”
