a hearth for Jewish poetry

Robin Beth Schaer

Birth Year
b. 1971
Current City
Oberlin, Ohio, USA
Birth City
Bronx, New York, USA
Genre(s)
Poetry, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism
Author’s Website
Author Reading

Biography

Robin Beth Schaer is a poet and essayist whose research and teaching interests include hybrid forms, contemporary poetry, environmental writing, documentary poetics, gender & sexuality studies, global literature, and Jewish studies. She is the author of the poetry collection Shipbreaking (Anhinga, 2015) and a work in progress on art and atrocity. Her recent awards include the Creative Capital Award Shortlist in 2022, a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts in 2021, and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Saltonstall Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Paris Review, and Guernica, among others. Schaer was educated at Colgate University and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She has taught writing in New York, New Jersey, and Ohio, and she worked as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty, a 180-foot ship lost in Hurricane Sandy.

Published Works

Naufragio; Spanish translation of Shipbreaking (Komorebi Ediciones, 2023)
Shipbreaking (Anhinga, 2015)

Links to Sample Works

Subject Matter

Aging, Antisemitism, Childhood, Cultural Identity, Death, Diaspora, Environment & Climate Crisis, Family, Grief & Elegy, History, Intergenerational Trauma, Jewish Mysticism, Jewishness, Love, Marriage, Motherhood/Fertility, Nature, Parenting, Sexuality, Shoah, Genocide, Feminism, LGBTQ+, Documentary Poetics, Race.