Rebecca Seiferle Editor-in-Chief of The Drunken Boat

Rebecca Seiferle

Photo by Karlis Pakarklis

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
—Henry David Thoreau

“To raise the ghost of Eliot once more, Seiferle has what he described as characteristic of the Renaissance but missing in the poetry of the modern age: 'unified sensibility.' Hers is a world where everything matters; she writes about dismemberment out of a sense of wholeness betrayed, of connectedness outraged. One expression of that wholeness is her capaciousness of imagination, the vast historical and geological scope of its landscapes of concern... ”

-Prairie Schooner.

Rebecca Seiferle's third poetry collection, Bitters, published by Copper Canyon Press, won the Western States Book Award and a Pushcart prize. Her previous collection, The Music We Dance To (Sheep Meadow 1999) won the 1998 Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America and poems from the collection were included in Best American Poetry 2000 and in The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, edited by Erin Belieu and Susan Aizenberg. Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Writers' Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and the National Writers' Union Prize, and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize.

Her translation of Vallejo's The Black Heralds was published in 2003, and her translations of Alfonso D'Aquino and Ernesto Lumbreras appeared in Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon 2002). Her translation of Vallejo's Trilce was a finalist for the 1992 PenWest Translation Award.

She has regularly reviewed for The Harvard Review and Calyx , and her poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in over twenty-five anthologies. Seiferle has a BA from the University of the State of New York with a major in English and History, and a minor in Art History. In 1989, she received her MFA from Warren Wilson College. She taught English and creative writing for a number of years at San Juan College and has taught at the Provincetown Fine Arts Center, Key West Literary Seminar, Port Townsend Writer''s Conference, Gemini Ink, the Stonecoast MFA program, and been poet-in-residence at Brandeis University. In 2004 she was awarded a poetry fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

For sample poems and more information, click on the book cover.