Photo credit: Éric Fontaine

About

Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren is a writer, editor, and translator based in Montreal.

Rachel was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, she studied English and creative writing, and spent a semester abroad in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. She went on to earn her MFA in poetry and literary translation from Columbia University. With the support of a Fulbright Fellowship, she then spent nine months in Rio de Janeiro, translating contemporary Brazilian poetry with a strong sense of place and writing a literary travel column for Words Without Borders, where she was also the Blog Editor. Rachel later worked as a Senior Editor for Joyland Magazine.

Rachel’s honors include a Hopwood Award, an Academy of American Poets prize, The Michigan Quarterly Review’s Paige Davidson Clayton Award for Emerging Poets, and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and the Walt McDonald First-Book Competition.

Her poems, interviews, essays, and translations appear or are forthcoming in journals including Ploughshares, Off Assignment, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Common, Poetry Northwest, Parchment, and Narrative. Her work has also been anthologized twice in Best New Poets and in The Color Wheel (Terrapin Books).

Rachel lives with her husband and two daughters in a creaky Victorian house with a wall of books and a sliding ladder.