Ruth Traubner Kessler
Biography
Ruth Traubner Kessler is an Israeli American poet born in Poland. Her publications include The Country of Elsewheres (Broadstone), Fire Ashes Wings (Finishing Line Press, chapbook), and over 80 individual poems. Her poetry has been set to music, featured in concerts and festivals, and made into an artist book and broadsides. She is the recipient of grants and residencies from NYSCA/NYFA, Yaddo, MacDowell, VCCA, and the Saltonstall Foundation. Her other writings include nonsense verse, poetry translations, short fiction, and a children’s book. She lives in New York City.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
Unlike my earlier work, the recent poetry draws heavily on my personal history as a child of Holocaust survivors and a Jewish immigrant across three continents, cultures, and languages.
The collection The Country of Elsewheres explores place, displacement, exile, and belonging. A manuscript in progress confronts second-generation Holocaust trauma. The “midrash” persona poems of The Slanted Mirror (a circulating manuscript) and Fire Ashes Wings are informed by the Bible and other Jewish texts. And throughout my poetry, the enduring connection to Israel — my home, wherever I live — remains an underlying thread.
Published Works
The Country of Elsewheres (Broadstone Books, 2025) – full-length collection
Fire Ashes Wings (Finishing Line Press, 2013) – chapbook
Hummingbird (Leopard Studio Editions, 2010) – limited edition artist’s book by Sue Leopard
Links to Sample Works
Jewish Poets Collective: Baggage
Odyssey: Love Poem
AJR Haggadah Supplement: Home (p. 103)
Languages of Publication(s) and Poets Translated
Translations from the Hebrew, mostly of Yehuda AmichaiSubject Matter
Aging, Antisemitism, Art & Ekphrasis, Childhood, Cultural Identity, Death, Diaspora, Eastern Europe, Family, Friendship, Grief & Elegy, History, Intergenerational Trauma, Israel/Palestine, Jewishness, Loss, Love, Marriage, Midrash, Motherhood/Fertility, Mythology, Narrative, Nature, Parenting, Shoah, Genocide, Torah, War, Visual Art, Immigration.Profile created by Ruth Traubner Kessler.
