W.J. Herbert
Retired
Biography
W.J. Herbert’s debut collection, Dear Specimen, (Beacon Press, 2021) was selected by Kwame Dawes as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and awarded a 2022 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Winner of the 2022 Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize for Poetry, Herbert’s work also appears in The Atlantic, Best American Poetry 2017 & 2024, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. A professional flutist and teacher, Herbert served for seven years as poetry series curator and annual contest administrator at A Center for the Arts in Pomona, California. She earned a bachelor’s in studio art at Pitzer College in Claremont, California and was awarded a Master of Music degree from University of Southern California and an MBA from UCLA. A decades-long resident of Southern California, she now lives mostly in Portland, Maine.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
I have written poems which included images and reflections concerning the Holocaust. I occasionally write about my Jewish upbringing. I often write about faith, especially as a member of the Jewish minority within a dominant Western Christian tradition/culture.
Published Works
Dear Specimen (Beacon Press, 2021)
Links to Sample Works
- Hudson Review, “100 Million Billion Stars Found Hiding in the Milky Way”
- Crab Orchard Review, “Dear Specimen”
- Poetry Daily, “Mounting the Dove Box”
- World Literature Today, “Fragile Eagle”
